


Before the World Falls Down

by alovelyburn



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: End of the World, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 01:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18378122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alovelyburn/pseuds/alovelyburn
Summary: There's an Apocalyptic Prophecy - one of many - that says a great wound will be torn through the land before the End of Days. Torn, and then healed. Angel thinks of this sometimes while he's planning their escape. He thinks, sometimes, that LA is the wound, and maybe coming home will bring on the end.





	Before the World Falls Down

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even remember how much of the Season 8 Buffy comics this adheres to, but not much. LA is still in Hell. Post-tv series obviously.

**Prologue.**

 

At first, Angel thinks about home.

He thinks of LA the way it was - sunlit streets he'd seen for the first time in centuries, the shadows playing across the face of the Hollywood sign at night, the alleys and pits of Hollywood Boulevard, and the sway of the trees that line the streets of Beverly Hills. Not that he spent much time there. He thinks of his first apartment in the so aptly named City of Angels - its dark corners, the elevator, the spaces where he argued with Buffy, where Faith hid, where Doyle smiled. He thinks of the hotel. Its lost souls and his broken neck. Wesley and Cordelia, Connor. Gunn. They're all gone, now.

Somewhere, or somewhen, he thinks of Sunnydale, too. At first.

After the first year ( _years_ ), he remembers the flow of time, and how a flood of hours in this dimension thins as it moves, and comes through to the Earth dimension in a trickle of seconds, until every day here becomes nothing at all in the world he came from. He remembers this from the first time, whenhe spent decades (longer) tormented by -- (he still doesn't think about it, he still doesn't remember) -- tormented, before he fell naked and feral to the floor of the building where he was once damned.  
When his mind cleared, he found that he'd only been gone for a few weeks, to them. (To her.)

They can't expect a cavalry. No army of slayers bursting through the long closed California Hellmouth, weapons in hand. No flash of blonde, no little quips, unless Nina counts. Nina may count. If she's even here.

That's the problem with Hell Dimensions, really. You can be gone for years, and you still can't expect help to come.

Of course, this time may be different. He's heard that each dimension has its own timescale -- differently flowing, from one to another, and maybe in this one a year is a month at home, or maybe it's six. Or maybe it's less - nanoseconds, less than a breath. Silently, he searches for escape in what free time he has -- spellbooks and scrolls, prophecies and fortune-telling.

And truth be told, he isn't sure how long it's been.

Here, there's no sun to tell time by.

 

**One.**

 

(There's an Apocalyptic Prophecy - one of many - that says a great wound will be torn through the land before the End of Days. Torn, and then healed. Angel thinks of this sometimes while he's planning their escape. While he's lopping the heads off the demonic lords. While he's plotting the downfall of Wolfram and Hart - for good.

He thinks, sometimes, that LA is the wound, and maybe coming home will bring on the end.

He tries not to believe that, though the words linger in the back of his mind. But he doesn't know. And even if he did, these are humans - people running through the streets below the broken windows of the Wolfram and Hart building. People born to Hell, used to Hell, yes, but deserving Hell?

No.

So Angel knows. One day, he'll find the architects of this. He'll march up to them. He'll lodge an axe right in the heart of the wolf. And then it will be over at last. LA freed, contract void. Rest for Wesley. Hell, rest for _himself._ One day.

But for now, it's this: teaching the new covens the right chants. Wishing there were an expert here: a Giles or, better, a Willow. Someone who knows the flow of magic directly, rather than through observation. Someone who could teach them... better than this.

Three generations of witches born and bred in the depths of hell, and they're still counting the days. Just testing the edges.

For now, it's just magic.)

* * *

LA is an empty series of buildings, a ghost town. It's funny because when people think about cities or land being pulled into Hell, they always think it would leave a physical stain, like a big crater or some kind of smoking debris. Like Sunnydale. Maybe the whole city would just vanish and leave flat ground and giant demonic symbol or something lame like that. Buffy read that one in one of Giles' dusty old books a long time ago. Well, maybe that's just her.

Then again, it could have been Willow who read that, and she just heard it. Either way.

Or it could be that's how it usually works. She wouldn't know for sure; it's not like cities regularly take vacation time and go surfing the boiling seas or anything like that.

But she does know when LA disappeared, the city didn't actually go anywhere.

* * *

"So, after this, what else is on the agenda?" Buffy pulls her gloves up to her mid-forearms and wiggles her fingers. Not exactly fashion forward, she has to admit - the half-arm glove, really not so much in style these days. But you do what you need to do, even if it does make you feel like you stepped out of a really bad episode of Project Runway. _Not_ that she ever watches that show.

Mira flips a page in her schedule book. Buffy waits for an answer for almost half a minute before she realizes that Mira's actually talking, voice swallowed by the helicopter's propellers. Buffy points up, and Mira widens her eyes before raising her voice. "Oh, sorry! After this, there's... crop circles. In um, Wyoming? Yeah, I think it's Wyoming."

"Great, just how I want to spend my Sunday afternoon - investigating some bored farmer's field mutilating hobby. Doesn't anyone play football anymore? Maybe have some chowtime with nachos and beer? Why are crop circles even _on_ the agenda?"

Mira stares at her, all panic-stricken and nerves. "I don't know?"

Newbies. One day they'll learn to ask questions.

Mira rubs her hands together, thick gloves on thick gloves. "The other day, I was listening to the radio, and there was this guy? He said that what happened to LA was a sign from God that the world is ending."

"Yeah, I hear that a lot." Buffy pulls a parachute onto her back and goggles over her eyes before she steps to the edge of the helicopter door. She holds The Scythe firmly between two hands. "I'll radio when I'm done," she says. "Hope I don't drop this."

She doesn't wait for an all clear before she jumps; the others will be following soon. In the meantime, she keeps her eyes open, watching the ground, the buildings grey and steelly below, coming close. The air whips at her face and the sky is big and wide and all around her.

Freefall. She'll never get used to that, either.

* * *

When it happened, people kept telling Buffy that it wasn't her fault.

Pretty annoying. She knew it wasn't her fault. She didn't tell Angel to take on the Thorn Gang or whatever they were called; she didn't tell him to piss off a cabal of demons and not even call her for backup. She _definitely_ didn't tell him to get dragged into Who Knew Where, along with his city and all of his friends. Not to mention one of _hers._ If Spike qualifies as a friend. Whatever he qualifies as.

And anyway, they weren't even really talking at the time, after the whole thing with Wolfram and Hart, after the thing with that slayer. They weren't exactly buddies, bosom or otherwise. And she told them, all of them, that she knew. That it was his fault if it was anyone's, and that she couldn't save him without knowing he needed saving. She told them over and over, and they kept saying, "Buffy, don't feel bad. It's not your fault." They kept saying, "There wasn't anything you could do." And she...

...she can still remember the morning after the night when it happened - Xander over her bedside on her left, and when she opened her eyes there was Willow on her right. For a second she thought it was some kind of weird high school flashback thing, like that time when they all slept in her bedroom, because that Yaza or Maza or whatever it was demon got all stalky at their houses.

Then Willow said, "Buffy," and Xander looked away, and just like that, she knew it was Angel.

It took them a year and what seemed like a million tests to figure out where the city had gone. Buffy felt sick when she heard it. She wanted to bloody her fist against the bathroom tile, but she couldn't let it in. She had to be the role model, instead, she had to be the leader. She had to be a grown up instead of a self-flagellating S&M freak, and anyway she was pretty sure she grew out of that phase years ago.

So she nodded, and when the demons started appearing, she sent a squadron of slayers to man the borders, and she went on patrol with Satsu that night.

( _And so she understands Spike a little more now, because she saved Angel every night for a year, in her mind. In her dreams, she touched the concrete of LA's ground and whispered his name, and the earth opened up and he was there again, with her name on his lips the way he was when she was seventeen and he found her again._ )

Willow said, "There wasn't anything you could do, Buffy."

And she said, "I know, Will."

( _How could they know she blamed herself?_ )

* * *

Buffy lands between buildings near the edge of the city, parachute pooling in a white canvas ocean behind her, the Scythe still cradled between her two hands. She shrugs the straps off of her shoulders as Donna and Bailey come to rest in the area, too, Donna stumbling two steps before she finds her footing. Already the air is weird; different. Charged. The pieces of Willow's magic that live inside her, they're all tingling and there are colors lingering in the air in her peripheral vision, dissipating into nothing when she tries to catch them head on. Buffy's body hums inside.

LA hasn't changed since the last time she came, really - a bit more graffiti from the "tourists," people who wander through just to see the old, dead city in its faded glory, and posters blanketing the walls, preaching damnation. Preaching the end.

Bailey's heels click on the pavement as she approaches Buffy. "Marla is coming," she says. "She's got news, I think." She glances at the defaced walls and shakes her head; Buffy looks, too - Aaron fucked Margaret, it seems, and the posters say _God is coming for you_. They say, _The Cycle Begins Anew_ and _Watch God Loves, Sundays 7am, ABC._ Spread across the face of it, a beautiful blond man smiles with his too many teeth, too big a grin.

Bailey snickers. "Shit. People, have a little respect for the departed! Even if it is a city. What a thing to profit from." Fingers spread wide against the surface of the poster, she says, "And look at this jerk. I call him Mr. Preacherman. Don't you think he looks like a Mr. Preacherman?"

Buffy barely hears her; the city is humming too, in tune with the magic in her blood. She crouches down, one knee to the dirty pavement, palm pressed against the ground. It's warm - flesh-warm. Burning just beneath the surface warm. Inside her skin, Willow's magic calls to the fire inside the cement, or the earth beneath. It can be hard to tell the difference. Buffy taps the pavement and lets the magic go. It tears through the ground, through and around buildings, a trail of energy pulsing in its wake, marking the true borders of LA. The borders beyond the metal and steel and into its missing soul.

Buffy never thought of cities as alive, until post-Angel LA.

She steps back, Bailey and Donna on either side of her; in the distance she hears footsteps (Marla? Satsu? And someone else.) and in front of them, a wall of magic marks the gateway between dimensions.

The footsteps slow, and stop. By her ear, Marla says, "Oh my God, what is that?"

Buffy doesn't look back. "It's the breaking point between LA and the two worlds it's in." Wavering near her body, its heat warms her skin as the magical wall bulges and fractures, heals and breaks.

Donna says, "It looks like something's trying to get out."

"I think it is," Buffy says. "The City of Angels." She holds up her hand, and the light of the gateway throws patterns on her palm - orange, blue and grey. "What happened to you?"

* * *

The first time they went there, after it happened, Willow said it was empty.

Buffy looked up and down the deserted streets, barren as a Midwestern ghost town in one of those stupid movies with the gunslinger spirits. She half expected tumbleweeds but it was LA so she got yesterday's newspapers instead.

"Yeah," she said, "I can kind of see that," but she knew that wasn't really what Willow meant. Because LA wasn't just empty of people, it was _empty_ \- the buildings, pristine, untouched as they were, they were fossils, and while the city looked like LA on the outside, the LA-ness of it had gone.

Buffy didn't know how to describe it, so she didn't try. But every time she thought about it, it made her shake inside.

LA died, and it left its bones behind. But it didn't take its ghosts.

(In the corner, on the street, she sees Angel's specter, the remembrance of him, and she hopes he's standing there, right there on the corner beneath the streetlamp with the mist at his feet and the moon at his back. And she knows that time moves differently in Hell than it does on the surface, and God, two years, LA has been gone for two years. She can't imagine how long it's been for them.

He could be gone forever. He could be dead, in a more than partial way.

He could be, but she doesn't believe it. Somehow she always thought, she always knew, she'd feel it if he disappeared.)

* * *

When Los Angeles comes home, the world bleeds red across the sky and crimson raindrops scorch the ground. The sun is red, too, the bloodied face of Apollo dripping fire into the clouds, and sometimes, the rain brings fire when it falls. The streets are filled with running people, and the gutters, the streets, the buildings are splashed with the blood of humans, the blood of the demons, the blood of the land.

Oh yeah, the demons.

There are fewer than Buffy would have thought (she notices this while she splits one in two, Scythe flashing in the shadows and the dark); there aren't as many as there could be. There are a few larger ones, and a few slithering lower beings and Buffy's never seen anything like... some of them. The claws and fangs, all right, but the skin, the way they trail flames behind them, the gleam of their oily flesh and the way their hands scrape the concrete and leave grooves and broken street where they step. The snakes and winged things, like pictures from a nightmare; like the mayor again. The slayers, her army, they start to move before she signals to them. The ones who can move, who aren't stricken motionless with fear.

She knows Angel is there before she sees him, but that doesn't dull the flood of relief of the sight of him. He doesn't look much the worse for wear, but it's not like he was losing out on a lot of premium suntanning time. And he's alive, in a dead kind of way. And Buffy's a little guarded, it's true, she's a little worried because it's not like they kissed the last time they spoke (or, okay, they did, but she means after that, the meeting that wasn't meeting). But there's no time for fretting because there's some kind of big purple thing with talons hovering over him and he's alive enough to kill it, and that's enough for her.

Angel says, "Buffy, behind you," and it's the first time she's heard his voice in years. She spins around, and cleaves a big red-black thing in half. Warnings, they're the best kind of hello.

"You _have_ to tell me how you brought it back," she says.

"We'll talk. Soon as we clean this up." Angel grabs an arm length shard of glass and shoves it through the chest of a rather nasty, mucous covered fish-thing; somewhere, far away, she sees the massive beating of... dragon wings? Angel says, "That could take a while."

Buffy ducks a scaly fist. "I bet I can speed it up," she says and presses a finger to her headset.

Static, and then Xander says, "Buff! Buffster! What's going on down there?"

Buffy breaks the scale-faced demon's arm over her knee. "A mess," she says, "Get Willow in here."

* * *

They meet in the burnt out remains of an old Starbucks. It's day two, and the demons are gone - fled back to the shadows, to the alleys and to Hell. The city is quiet now, except for the crying, and the footsteps. LA, infested with monsters that skulk in the shadows and flee from the light. Sort of like everywhere else. It'll never be the same again.

Buffy sweeps glass shards from the seat at one of those little tables that are never open in any city but this one. She sweeps dust from the surface, too. Angel stands by the counter, and the slight breeze from the broken in windows stirs his frayed and torn up coat. He doesn't look older, of course he doesn't. But he looks tired. He looks worn. She pats the table across from her, and Angel shakes his head.

"Not in much of a sitting mood," he says.

"Okay. Feel free to stand there and be Mr. Grumpypants." Buffy shrugs and watches the white dust on her palm. She tries not to think of what it might be. Scattered vampire flesh and bone and brain and sinew and magic mixed with decomposition mixed with age. In some world, some time, it could have been him.

He asks what he's missed, and she tells him about a few elections, a few world ending crises.

He says, "I meant, what did I miss with you."

She stops, kicks the ground. "My life has been pretty cue the etcetera music. I mean, aside from the whole collapsed hometown and the international slayer operation. Overall, nothing you'd want to see."

Angel says, "I didn't think we'd ever get back."

"How long were you there?" Buffy wipes the dust onto her pants. "I mean, in Hell Dimension time."

Moonlight filters through the broken glass, the shattered marks of the windows. The shadows of cracks lay crystalline patterns across Angel's face. "Don't know," he says. "I lost track after a while."

She has so many questions, endless whys and hows and whats. Things the Watcher's Council, such as it is, would want to know, to fill out the emptied body of its knowledge, everything lost when the First Evil destroyed the original council, and its headquarters.

But she doesn't ask. And when she gets back to Scotland and tells Xander, tells Giles, that she has no answers and no idea, they'll give her that look like they did when she was just a child. And they'll think she's lost her mind again, lost her mind over that billowing coat and that dark-eyed pain, the way she did at sixteen and seventeen, eighteen. The way she never stopped doing, not really. And Xander will say Angel's messed things up again, and Willow will say they should try to be understanding, and Buffy will let them argue it out and blame her, or absolve her.

She won't tell them why she didn't ask. She won't tell them that the ghosts in Angel's eyes told her more than anything he could have said or done. She won't tell them that she couldn't bring herself to make him relive whatever it is he's just escaped, or dig up the bones of everything he's lost.

He leaves with Spike and a slender, blue haired woman before the sun comes up. Spike looks at her with old eyes, too, and he waves goodbye without speaking. For a moment, she looks for something there - a spark of that old obsession, or even just a little... life. But he looks away before she finds it, if there's anything to find.

It's funny how things can change.

Spike, Angel and the blue demon-woman. Illyria, she thinks, or at least that's what she heard.

It takes a few minutes for her to realize that they are all that's left of Angel's friends, Angel's world.

**Two.**

 

(He comes home, older, to a world that's barely changed, except the ruin in LA, except the demons and the screaming. Outside the borders of his city, he knows people are still laughing, dancing - it's only been two years, for them. For him, it's been... he doesn't think about that. He never has.

But he lost his son centuries ago, and now he barely remembers the sound of Connor's voice, the flash of his eyes.

And he'd think that, after everything, people would want to leave. They'd flood out of the streets and over the city borders, into San Francisco, into Washington, into the Midwest. They'd walk to the nearest working airport and fly away. He'd think that, because it's what he wants to do. But the people, the humans, of LA are generations bred in Hell, and they're frightened of the one moon glowing silver in the sky, and they're frightened of the sun. The army comes in with food and supplies, and they leave boxes in the streets for the terrified residents who won't leave their houses and don't know what to think of the uniforms and the guns.

The army comes in, or maybe, maybe it's the Initiative, or maybe they're the same thing now that plausible deniability has evaporated.

Angel watches it from rooftops, this city full of people who remain in Hell, because it's all they know. Watching them, his stomach tightens, and turns.

His fault, he thinks, his fault. He's damned them, and damnation took them so far into torment that they no longer know how to come back.)

* * *

Winters in New York are always cold. Buffy remembers that from those months living in a shitty apartment, waiting tables, calling herself Anne. She remembers it from the time in 2006 when she and Kaya stalked a Uemdrr demon through the alleys and over the hoods of police cars. But this winter is bitter and sharp and Buffy feels the sting even through her coat. It's almost a relief to climb down manholes into the sewers. At least there she's out of the wind.

Two slayers move with her, flanking her on the left and right. Satsu, and another. The other is new; she came to them a few weeks ago, and is present to observe as much as she's there to fight. Her name might be Sam. Buffy feels like a jerk for not remembering, even though they've only spoken once or twice. That's one of the things about being a leader, she's noticed - she usually feels like a jerk for one reason or another. It's like it comes with the business cards. Well, the ones she doesn't have.

It was Mira that first told them something was wrong with New York. She'd been stationed there for a few weeks when she called, keeping the vampire gangs at bay (Vampire gangs. Buffy still can't take that seriously.). Her voice came over their headsets, echoed through the main observation room. _Walking dead,_ she said, and in the distance Buffy could hear the scraping, the drag and thud, of bodies moving slow.

Xander said, "Cool, it's a return to the classics." And then he said, "Mira?"

There was a thumping sound, a gasp. After that, Mira didn't say anything anymore.

They find her floating, face down, in the sewage after a few minutes. Her fingers are still half-wrapped around her dagger, and Buffy fights down a wave of sickness. It's inevitable really, but Buffy hates losing slayers. Their talents, their bravery, should be rewarded with something better than this.

"Sam" closes her eyes and Buffy can hear her count to ten under her breath before she says, "Zombies?"

Buffy mutters "Yes," and keeps her eyes on Mira, her ears open for the stirring of water, or the thump of heavy, leaden feet. She's so busy listening that she doesn't notice Angel until he's actually in front of her. She doesn't tense up. She isn't surprised. It's not that they knew he'd be there. It's just that somehow she always feels like she knew he was there, even if she didn't.

Angel says, "I guess you're here to stop the zombies."

And Buffy shrugs. "That's kind of the idea. Undead armies lumbering through Times Square at midnight? Not great for the tourist economy. Plus, I'm pretty much a no undead tolerance kind of girl. No offense."

"None taken."

"And they killed one of my people, which puts me in Buffy smash mode."

In the dim light, Angel may be smiling, if only a little bit. "Yeah, I remember that about you."

They drag Mira's body to the side of the tunnel, out of the water, and Buffy whispers a promise to come back for her. Angel rests his hand on her shoulder as they walk together under the streets of the city, winding through tunnels. The stink is suffocating; Satsu and maybe-Sam cover their noses with their sleeves. For a moment Buffy wishes she were like Angel, breathless and spared. After a few turns, they decide to split up, Buffy and Angel, Satsu and maybe-Sam, to cover more found, and double the chances of finding any new information, new victims, new nests. Each group carries a handheld device with blueprints of the sewer to lead them to their mutual destination - the abandoned warehouse Mira named in her final call.

Buffy listens to her slayers wandering off into the tunnels, their footsteps echoing until they disappear.

It's quiet then, aside from the heaving of breath, the stirring of sewage. So quiet it's distracting; almost as distracting as the scurrying rats, the suddenly appearing mice. Minutes pass by, or hours, and Buffy starts talking just to keep herself company, and Angel talks back, sometimes. Sometimes, they grow quiet and the ceiling, the walls, they shake with the passing of trains. At least, Buffy hopes it's passing trains and not some kind of screaming, world-shaking, slithering thing.

She says, "What are you doing in New York, anyway? I thought you were a California vampire."

Angel stays silent for a few moments, his footsteps heavy just a stride behind her. Finally, he says, "Couldn't stay there any more."

Buffy glances back, over her shoulder, to the familiar face now so scarred, so stoney. "Oh."

"Everywhere I went, there were ghosts. Places I saw with Connor, stores that crumbled decades ago in Hell, and now they're back, good as new. It's weird. The unfortunate side effect of spiritual reconnection."

"Reconnecting is of the good." Buffy says with her gaze to the ground. "Usually."

"Anyway, the city can heal itself." Angel says, "It doesn't need a guardian, now."

* * *

"Zombies don't actually eat brains," Buffy says when they've reached the old warehouse headquarters of whatever it is that's pumping out zombies like some kind of creepy candy factory. Satsu and Sam (it was Sam, she knows now) are there, too, and Sam shivers from the cold, maybe, or the visions of what she's seen tonight, like the cold, bloated face of Mira with its white skin and glazed eyes, like the seven undead things she found on her way to this place, this door, that left her hands and her face stained with black blood and rotted flesh by the time she and Satsu reached the meeting point. The two of them grip their swords and daggers, throwing stars strapped to their thighs, flame throwers at their hips. Buffy carries the Scythe, and the crossbow on her back. It's all she ever needs. Sometimes she forgets how, compared to her, even the veteran slayers are new.

Buffy says, "They don't eat, but they _do_ kill. And _when_ they kill, their victims get up and join the conga line, so watch your back. And watch _each other's_ backs."

Angel says, "I'll watch yours." His face is inscrutable, unreadable. Maybe that's why it isn't as comforting as it should be. Still, Buffy flashes a grin just before she kicks in the door.

It's a demon; of course it is. Some old body falling apart at the seams, and its jerky, disconnected movements are like stop-motion animation, or claymation. Some kind of gross perversion of the Christmas specials Buffy watched as a child - grey mess and rotted skin. Its blood is black on her hands when it finally comes apart, and it turns the ground black, too. Angel cleans up the extra, the walking dead, shambling masses.

And together, they still move like poetry, like a dance - back to back, her hands and his hands, her Scythe and his fists, his fingers, his blades.

Buffy catches her breath as one by one the bodies fall to pieces, and Angel leaves without saying goodbye.

That's not surprising, either.

She wishes it were. Maybe she wishes it were.

She remembers, sometimes, that he's even older than he was before - by countless hours, endless days. Maybe she should be grateful he even remembers her name.

The New York streets are cold, empty, and the sky is black as coal. The moon is drowning in its velvet folds. Buffy rubs her arms through the thickness of her coat; at her side; Satsu lays a hand on her shoulder and says, "So, this was Angel?"

Buffy nods, bottom lip tucked between her teeth.

Satsu says, "Not really one for pleasantries, is he?" and her voice is soft, sad.

Buffy shakes her head and says, "I guess not."

They take Mira home, her face covered with Buffy's jacket. In the helicopter, Bailey can't stop crying; Buffy hugs her knees as Satsu watches her, and Buffy doesn't know what to say; she never has. Even if she could, all she can think of is Angel's empty face, and Mira's empty eyes. Instead of talking, Buffy watches the steam rise from her lips as she breathes.

One day, Buffy found Mira sitting on a park bench in the center of London, sipping a slurpy and watching the people, eyes down and sad. And Buffy sat beside her and asked what was wrong; Mira said it wasn't fair, their being slayers. And Buffy said, _I know_ , she said, _I understand_ , because she thought she did. She thought she knew how Mira felt, because she'd felt the burden, too. Being the chosen, and having no choice.

But Mira said, _It's not fair to them. They're surrounded by so much darkness and they don't even know._ She said, _How can anyone be free if they don't know?_

__She said, _I guess that's why we need to keep them free._  
  
Bailey finds a flyer in Mira's pocket, all warped surface and bleeding ink. She says, "It's Mr. Preacherman," and sniffles. "Do you think the cycle really is starting over?"

Buffy says, "What cycle?"

Just in that moment, everything seems too cruel to contemplate. Maybe the cycle really is starting over. She always heard that history repeats itself, or else that if you didn't know your history you'd just end up falling into the same patterns all over again. And okay she didn't want to think so when she was in, say, Junior High or even High School, because really who thought there'd be another guy in a big hat leading a civil war, for example? Who thought there'd be another FDR? Hell, who knew what FDR even did, in 8th grade?

Who wanted to believe Angel would end up in Hell again, or that every few weeks, there'd be another dead slayer?

 

**Three.**

 

(The wound, says the prophecy, will bleed without end and the blood of it will flood the world.

Angel watches over LA, sometimes, though he can't bear the echoes of its streets. The cage it's become, since the government quarantined it, locked it up, not knowing what to do with a generation of city-dwellers born in torment, raised in madness. A generation that sees monsters in the eyes of everything and everyone they pass, touch, or meet the eyes of.

It's like a prison island, and they're trapped with the remnant demons, too. It's worse than a prison. It's death row.

His fault, he thinks. His fault.

He goes to LA sometimes, too, in the dead of night when the wind is at its coldest and the breath of frost demons, fire demons, make the streets unbearable, and the vampires roam like street gangs in the alleys and hold court in the major roads. When he goes, he brings his tools, and sometimes his friends - Illyria, fallen goddess full of rage, and Spike, haunted and quiet as he's become. In truth, he isn't sure whether he likes either of them, but there's comfort in them now, after so long together. In truth, even if he doesn't like them, he loves them as much as he can love, now.

Sometimes, he wonders if the prophecy refers to him. He wonders if the wound is in him - the hole where Connor lived, or where Wesley lived, where Gunn was until the final stake driven through his heart scattered his body into ashes, his memory to dust. He wonders if it will bleed forever, too, like the prophecy says.

His fault, again. His fault.

And when the end comes - soon, so soon he feels it in his ancient bones - that, too, will be his fault.)

* * *

Home is Scotland now, and Buffy goes there between missions, and nothing ever changes. She goes home to find Xander in the monitor room, Willow and Dawn in the kitchen. January lingers in the air, and she's shivering when she walks in, and still cold when she sits down with a cup of cocoa. Quietly, finger dancing, Willow makes the steam collect into little heart shapes, and then into Xs and Os like this canned pasta Buffy used to eat at school. Tic Tac Toe, maybe. She thinks it was Chef Boyardee, but she hasn't been to a grocery store in years and it's hard to remember details, sometimes.

Buffy says, "It's so cold out there, Will."

Willow bobs her head a little. "It's winter. Winter is supposed to be wintery," she says.

Buffy bobs her head in agreement and sips. "I don't care what they say, Swiss Miss is still the leader of the chocky pack."

Across from her, Willow plays tic-tac-toe with the steam, distracted by something. It could be the game. But there's something she isn't saying, Buffy can feel it lingering in the air. She doesn't know if it's personal, or not. Another fight with Kennedy, maybe, or another black-eyed nightmare. Visions of the past. Sometimes the personal and professional blur together, especially for them.

Buffy sips her cocoa and doesn't ask.

But March comes, the month that comes in like a lion - they say it goes out like a lamb, but this year it screams when it leaves just as it did when it arrived. April follows, and May. Buffy wears her heaviest coat in June when she sits on the edge of the stairs in the massive room that used to house her once-giant sister. She swings her feet, shivering under her coat. Wondering where Angel is, now - where Spike is, too. Wondering when the grey skies will turn blue.

After seven months, she stops waiting for winter to end.

When the wolf attacks begin, the media keeps saying it must be the cold. The animals, they say, are driven by starvation, desperation. Half the world is, too - humans can survive on food grown indoors, in simulated outdoors environments - greenhouse lights and warming coils buried under the soil. But it can't last forever, everyone knows. The fights are already starting over things like dog food. Cat food. Are they wasted resources, or are they necessities? No one can decide. Buffy doesn't blame the pet owners for demanding food rights. If she had a puppy, she'd totally give them Alpo.

That night, perched on the edge of Buffy's bed, Willow says she can hear the Earth screaming. For some reason, this doesn't sound like a good sign.

* * *

Given that it's a castle, Buffy would have thought that there'd be a larger kitchen, but no. The kitchen is small and warm with its stone walls turned gold by the glowing burners. On the corner of the counter, a portable television runs, whispering, barely audible over the boiling water and her fingers drumming on the side of the fridge. Buffy pours hot water into a mug and watches her tea bag float and bob on the miniature waves, and softly, by her ear, the television whispers that the rapture is coming. Right now it's just her and Mr. Preacherman.

_"The world is cleansed in the blood of sinners,_ " he says, and he smiles while he does it with his smarmy white bread face, his middle-America blond. _"The world is cleansed! And then it is redeemed."_ Inside the studio, the congregation, they clap and they shout and they cry to their makers. Outside the studio windows, the sky is grey and cold; Buffy thinks she can see snowflakes falling, and it's August now. Maybe it's just her imagination.

_Endings bring religion_. Buffy's father used to say that, in the days when he said anything to her, ever. That old saying, there are no atheists in foxholes, it's true.

She sits at the kitchen table watching the television, sipping hot cocoa and rubbing the numbness out of her joints - another cold night, another patrol. Usually she watches the news, but tonight it won't help, she knows. They'll talk about prolonged eclipses, they'll talk about rotation. And it's been days since anything really interesting happened, anyway. Not that it matters. Not that anything will, for long.

Outside the castle windows, the sky is purple and red. She hopes it's only dusk.

Honesty. That's what's missing from the evening news. No one's willing to come out and say, "We're dying." No one except Mr. Preacherman, and he's crazy.

These days, everyone is quiet. Buffy mutters her goodbyes on her way to the helicopter, or the elevators. She meets Satsu in graveyards, and they reminisce together, carefully not touching. Careful with each other's hearts, and their own.

Willow meditates, she speaks to spirits. Xander sends her reports about where to go, and where to avoid. Buffy feels like a robot, in a way.

Giles flips through pages of ancient books, but the library of the "Watcher's Council" is not what it was. With so much lost in the battle against the First, all those years ago, now it's just a pile of found books - things they picked up at auctions, or found in demons' lairs.

At midnight, sitting across the table from Buffy, surrounded by the blue light of the television, he says, "Every culture has its myths of the end days, Buffy. The Norse called it Ragnarok, the Christians... Armageddon. Apocalypse. The Ends of Times. The trouble is knowing which one we're facing now."

Buffy leans her chair on its back legs. "I've heard this whole speech before, Giles. Just tell me if you can figure out which one we're dealing with." It's warm inside, the glowing fire and the magic of a dozen minor witches - Willow's protégés and apprentices. And the air is golden like firelight, playing off the cold grey walls and against Giles' face.

"Not yet. Most of the Apocalyptic tomes were destroyed with the Council."

"I remember." She glances down at the table. Behind her, Mr. Preacherman says there is virtue in sacrifice, salvation in loss. Buffy wants to reach her hand through the screen and strangle him. "Another day, another end of days, right? We'll figure it out."

Giles looks at her from above the rim of his glasses but doesn't say anything.

Outside, she hears the screaming of wolves.

* * *

Oz comes to them one night, half-transformed and half-mad. He's never been a loquacious man, but now his words are growls, and he can only speak with his eyes.

Buffy locks him in a containment cell - voluntary confinement. One of many, surrounded by his less honorable kin - the werewolves Buffy and her friends have captured, but can't bring themselves to kill. Now, with the magic in the air gone mad, the lower levels of the castle are like a wild animal choir as, together, the beast-men pace and howl at the crescent moon. Half the night, Buffy sits in the corner of the room, watching her high school friend fight himself all over again. It's like being back in the library, but weirder.

At 3am, Willow comes downstairs, shivering and wrapped in shawls. Buffy watches for long minutes as Willow pushes back tears, palm pressed against the glass, Oz's hand pressed against the other side, too.

And Buffy doesn't believe in soulmates, (although she did once, with Angel, when she still thought that she was allowed to feel things the way normal people can). And she knows Willow is "gay now _._ "And she knows that Tara is still, will always be, the love of Willow's life.

But even so, sometimes she wonders if maybe sometimes there really can be just that one exception. Maybe.

Buffy watches Oz's fingers grow longer and shorter, his nails sharp and dull, feeling uneasy and voyeuristic. And she knows Willow can protect herself - hell, she can protect herself better than Buffy can - so she leaves them there, alone together. Sharing whatever things they have left to share in whatever time there is left to share them.

 

**Four.**

 

(He can smell the changes in the air with his ancient senses, and he can smell the wolven scent lingering in the streets of everywhere he's ever been, and everywhere he goes. It's in the East Village when he moves through the shadows at midnight, and it's in the dirty alleyways of Chicago and the sewers in San Francisco. Angel moves often, and never escapes it.

He meets Nina again in Kern County, searching for a werewolf that turns out to be here. It takes him a moment to recognize her; it's been such a long, dark time. For another moment he stands, motionless, a statue draped in wind, and tries to remember her name. And he knows that she meant something to him once, but for some reason he can't quite recall why, or how.

She says she waited for him, and when Los Angeles came back she waited longer still. She says, "You told me to be safe. I thought you'd at least come to make sure that I was."

She smells like wolf musk and moonlight, and her eyes are yellow-black, her fingers trembling. Truthfully, he'd assumed she was dead.

There's fur along the edge of her neck, and her fingers are half-claws. He remembers, halfway through their conversation, that she smelled like strawberry shampoo and Dove soap before he went away.

Nina says, "I don't know what's _happening_ , Angel," and she clutches her arms, claws digging into her skin, just a bit too light to cut. She squeezes her eyes shut. "I don't know what's happening to _me._ "

His hand on the crook of her neck, on the small of her back, he pulls her close. Her body is tense muscle, knotted steel and peach fuzz fur always threatening to grow thicker, darker, engulfing. Angel tells her to close her eyes.)

* * *

Angel brings this blonde woman to Scotland for help. Buffy's never seen her before, but somehow it's not surprising how California she is, and how blonde, like Darla and like Buffy herself, at least between partial-morphs. It's not really surprising that she's a werewolf, either. A werewolf named Nina, Angel says, and Nina is sleeping when she arrives, held in restraints and cradled in Angel's arms like a broken doll.

He says, "Something is wrecking havoc on her cycle, Buffy." He frowns. "Her werewolf cycle. Moon cycle. Whatever you want to call it. I've been knocking her out for days trying to get her here. She needs help." And Buffy wants to say, _Wow, you definitely have a type,_ but there isn't time. Instead, she has Nina brought to the cells belowground, locked near Oz, separated by a foot of steel and a pane of glass. Angel stares through the panel at Nina, watching her change, change back. "This is glass," he says, "Don't you need--"

"Will came up with this spell. It makes glass all metally. I think she got the idea from Andrew. He calls it glassteel." Buffy tugs the ends of her pigtails. "I keep feeling like that's some kind of major geek injoke, but I'm not enough of a major geek to get with the in. Anyway, the glass isn't going to break. I don't think _I_ could get out of it."

He watches her, eyes burning. He says, "You could."

Buffy smiles. "I gots muscles."

Around them, werewolves pace in every stage of transformation, morphing between one and another, leaving scratches imbedded in the concrete floor. A soft snore here, and a howl of frustration there - Oz is sitting in the corner, curled up - Nina sleeps, still changing, and Angel watches her while Buffy watches him watching her. Buffy's gut twists up inside, though she doesn't know who the woman is, or how he knows her. She can guess. Nina is a little beautiful, Buffy thinks, and a lot of Darla, and she's built the way Buffy might have been, if the patrols and the training had never melted her curves away into muscle and bone. There's something solid about Nina, something lush. Still, in the flickering white fluorescent light, Nina looks smaller and paler than she did upstairs. Angel is quiet. Still. It's eerie sometimes the way he doesn't move, when he's not moving.

He says, "It took me a half hour to really remember her, Buffy."

"What's there to remember?"

"She was..." His gaze lingers on Nina, and then on Buffy. She feels oddly uncomfortable in his gaze. "I told her to get out of LA before we took on the Black Thorn. She did. That would have been comforting if this hadn't happened. At least if she'd gone with us, she wouldn't be going through this."

"Yeah," Buffy says, "'Cause she'd be dead. Probably demon chow." She crosses her arms across her chest, and above her head, Angel won't look at her. "You don't give yourself enough credit, Angel. You got her out of harm's way, and you got LA out of--"

"I got LA sent there to begin with," he says. "Some champion."

"Well, if you want to brood, I guess you've got the time."

Angel stands away from her, not too far, but far enough. It's like he's respecting her personal space. The empty air between them is cold and still.

Buffy sighs. "Want to grab a cup of cocoa?" She tips her head at his strange look and his silence. "There's always time for chocolatey fun."

Angel glances back at Nina's cell just before they leave the basement, the dungeon, whatever it was called. Side by side, still apart, they head upstairs to the cozy little kitchen Buffy has come to love, in her way. Not that she can book. But it's a good place to go for cocoa and Friends reruns. When they're on, these days.

She boils a cup of milk on the stove and shakes a little paper packet. "Always take a moment to know your Swiss Miss." Sitting at the table, Angel is silent, his hands laced together on the table surface. She says, "It's not the most castley ever kitchen, but it's good for the making of foodstuffs. I mean, when we don't order Italian food. Pizza." She glances over her shoulder. "Kidding. You don't exactly have a lot of delivery places in the area."

"This place isn't a bad choice of headquarters for an army."

"Well, it's bigger than Sunnydale High, and it's definitely techie-heaven. But sometimes I miss the comforts of home. You know, soft things and warm things and fluffy things." She slides pours the packets of hot chocolate mix into two mugs. "I guess I was never really a James Bond kind of girl." Still, she does what she has to do.

Angel doesn't say anything, just stares at his hands with this line of tension running vertical over his furrowed brow. Buffy sighs. Watching the milk start to simmer. It's quiet. Too quiet.

Dawn once asked her how she can tell that vampires are vampires and not people. How she picks them out of the crowd. And once she didn't know - she couldn't have described the subtle tells, and sometimes she got it wrong, too - witness Angel, witness her confusion when their lips met and his teeth grazed her tongue. But now she knows at least one of them: it's the way they're perfectly silent sometimes - no breath, no rustling of cloth, because it's the way they're perfectly still, too. Sometimes, it's the way they look a little lost. Angel looks lost, now.

Buffy finishes the cocoa, mixes the powdered chocolate and hot milk, and sets a mug each in front of him and herself as she sits down. "You're kind of in limbo, Angel." She sips her cocoa, and he watches her face. Under his gaze, she feels oddly awkward and small. "Not that I know what Limbo is like. I mean, Hell, yeah. Heaven, been there, done that. But I haven't checked out Limbo yet. I don't know how someone gets a ticket to--"

"She waited for me, and I barely remembered her name."

Buffy blinks and looks up. "Nina?" She rubs one foot against the other. "Um. I kind of thought she was your..."

He watches her blankly for a moment before he understands. "No, she's..." his voice trails off, and his eyes are distant, staring inward, maybe, trying to remember. "She was. Before. And when we got back, she still..."

"But you didn't."

"She stayed in the area, waiting, and when the city came back she kept waiting. I barely remembered her. It's been a long time, Buffy."

"Still. Blonde, young, kind of supernatural?" Buffy shifts in place and her booted feet make scruffing noises against the floor. "I guess you really have a type."

"Maybe," he says. "Except for Cordy."

She doesn't know what she wanted him to say, but it definitely wasn't that.

"Cordy? Cordelia Chase? Too-bad-the-teacher-is-dead-but-hey-at-least-I-lost-some-weight Cordelia Chase?"

"She had changed, Buffy. It's too bad you didn't know her before she died. She became... a pretty remarkable woman." Angel shakes his head. "At least I think she was. It's hard to remember now. Little bits and pieces, it's like another life."

Buffy remembers when Angel was a fairy tale collection she read to herself every night. Stories she made up, his history and his future, and how they would stand together through it all. She thought in dresses and tuxes, or the old time Prince Charming uniforms seen in old Disney movies, all the while imagining who he was as a mortal, and who he had become after the curse. She didn't really know who he had been, but even so, he was her favorite book.

But like every fairy tale, he's always been a little bit of a metaphor, and a complex one at that. One she didn't quite understand, no matter how much she tried - all surface simplicity and a tangled web of interlocking meaning underneath. A story with many versions, different layers. Things she never saw because there were always too many centuries between them. There are even more now. Maybe that's one of the reasons they weren't meant to be.

It's two in the morning, and the television is still whispering out updates - Mr. Preacherman, running 24/7, or so it seems, on the prayer channel or whatever whoever has put on. Buffy glances at the screen, the news running across the bottom of the screen - the flooding here, the burning there; Mr. Preacherman says, " _The new order is coming_ ," in his reverend voice. " _Prostrate yourself before divinity. Embrace the coming of the new world. God is coming for you."_

Buffy flips the tv off and wrinkles her nose. "I hate that guy. He's either stirring up panic or pathetically profiting from the demise of the world. I don't know who keeps putting him on, but if I find out I owe them a punch in the nose." She stares into her mug, now gone empty and cold. "Giles doesn't know what's happening. Everyone knows it's another Apocalyptic Event. Maybe a big one. But we don't know, Angel. All the books, everything we always... relied on, even Willow's magic, it's all coming up with nothing. Just winter and more winter, and the occasional boiling river."

She turns her face up, and Angel is watching her, his eyes soft and unchanging. He still looks the way he did the last time she saw him, and the time before that. He still looks the way he did the first time they met.

He says, "Don't worry about it, Buffy. You always make it out, in the end." He pushes his cup away. "Remember when the mayor was about to unleash certain destruction on the entire town? You got an entire grade full of undisciplined teenagers to take up arms and defend themselves. Or that Christmas when I thought I was going insane. I was going to stand there until the sun turned me to dust but you talked me down."

"I didn't talk you down. The sun didn't come out that day."

"But it came out the next day. And I would have been standing on that hill when it did, if it wasn't for you."

Buffy stares at the table. "You said you didn't remember much from before."

"I don't. But I remember you."

He says it so easily, like it isn't important. Then he sips his cocoa, and she wonders if he can taste it - if he can taste anything. She's never really known.

Sitting there, she thinks of how lonely she is, sometimes, even in a castle full of slayers, watchers, friends. She thinks of how lonely he must be.

Buffy presses her palms against the sides of her mug, warming its cold surface, breathing the last whiffs of chocolate air. "Angel... you don't have to wander around the globe all on your lonesome. We've got plenty of rooms. And Copters. And big monitory screens that keep track of stuff, with an eye patch guy to tell us where the bad guys are." She kicks, lightly, at the kitchen table leg. "You could probably do a lot more good working with us than you can alone."

Angel doesn't say anything, but he looks at her - just looks, and his eyes -- she doesn't know how he does it, that look that's part gentle, part intense. It shakes her inside, like it always has.

(They aren't meant to be. She tells herself that again, and wonders if he still tells himself the same thing, or if he's outgrown the need for reminders.)

After that, he doesn't really leave anymore.

**Five.**

(He spends his nights patrolling, his days pacing the empty corridors. Around him, the slayers share wary glances, and they move aside when he walks. Sometimes they reach for their weapons, instinctively. He knows his presence unnerves them. It's fair enough. Their presence unnerves him, too.

Sometimes, he catches himself thinking like the old man he is. In his day, he thinks, there was only one, and she knew his face, and his name - every slayer since the day he was reborn has known that, until now. Now there are too many, and the name "Angelus" no longer strikes fear into the hearts of the Chosen. Angel is grateful for that, at least.

He isn't grateful for the nightmares.

At first, he doesn't tell anyone about them; eventually, he tells Spike.

It's the Slayer Army's technology, its magic, that lets them find Spike to begin with. They track him down in Paris, smoking French cigarettes and dressed in black. His hair's changed - a bit of brown in the roots, just along the edges, but his swagger hasn't. Spike says, "Angel," in that same working class affect, that bullshit dialect he adopted centuries ago, and Angel hates how glad he is to hear it.

They drink together at a pub in misty-damn London, old buddies, or something close. They drink, and Angel tells him the end is here. He says, "I see it my dreams, Spike. We should have left the city in Hell. We started something bad."

Spike shrugs watching Angel over the rim of his beer mug. "All right," he says, "So we buggered it up and now the whole world's gone pear-shaped. What else is new?"

Angel doesn't say that he's tired of hearing that this is nothing different, nothing worse, because he's not sure it's true. Because even if it isn't, they can't stop it if they don't understand it. And he thinks of his nightmares - the rivers of blood, and the flash of blonde hair behind the closing pits of Hell. He says, "Can we count on you to give us a hand?" Spike blows cigarette smoke in Angel's face. Angel doesn't breathe it in. "Buffy could use your help, too." It's a bit of a low blow, and he knows it. He isn't even sure it will work.

But Spike takes a long drag and orders another beer. His face is tense, his eyes downcast, and there's a shadow lingering over his features, like the ghost of a memory.

Spike says, "Well, it seems you can find me. If there are any giants or ogres or... t-rexes clomping about... you can always give me a ring."

Angel leaves Spike in the shadows of a corner table, and calls for the helicopter to bring him home before dawn.)

* * *

"It's written in the pages of divine law. It's written between the hand-scrawled lines of the oldest testament, that there will come a reckoning. That someday, each of us will be judged for who we are and what we've done, the fields we've sown and reaped, the fruits of our labor and what we have shared. It's written on the soul - that deep and undeniable knowledge that there will come a day when judgment comes down upon the human race with all the weight of heaven and hell. That the Earth will open wide and show its teeth, and we will all face the truth of who we are, what we've done.

"And so the cycle begins again. The rapture of change. The blood of sinners and the saved, the guilty and the innocent, the sacrifice that brings forth a new age, a new dawn. The coming of a new world sculpted by the hands of powers far greater than that of man.

"It is written, and so it shall pass."

(Buffy swallows down her last sip of orange juice. She turns off the television and watches Mr. Preacherman's face as it vanishes into black.)

* * *

They go to Venice by nightfall, where the water is hot, though the air is freezing. Buffy and Angel, together again. She isn't sure when they became a "they," in the fighting partners way not the other way (at least she's pretty sure it isn't the other way), but it doesn't matter. They work together well, and if their battles were a once duet now, joined by other slayers, they've become a symphony.

The sky is pink and streaked with grey clouds, and it's almost midnight. Faith is already there, all black leather jacket and black jeans, chestnut hair blowing in her eyes. Buffy wants to say she doesn't hesitate at the sight of her. Buffy wants to say she's learned to trust again, but she hasn't, not fully. It's unfair, in a way, how she forgives everyone so easily, except for Faith. But it's visceral, and it's a wound that never closes, and every time Faith does something questionable, it opens again. So Angel talks to her while Buffy scans the area for water-boiling demons, or demons of flames or volcanism or something else with water-boiling potential.

She glances over her shoulder as she leaves - taking in the sight of them, Faith and Angel talking, their close stance, another "they" that she can't be a part of. It reminds her, unpleasantly, of Angel and Faith in the mansion where he hid; it reminds her of them in Angel's apartment and goodbyes that could have been forever. For a split second, a white hot shard of hate lodges in her gut, and then it passes away. It was years ago. It was _years_ ago, and longer for him. That's the saddest part: he probably doesn't even remember.

She walks the streets of Venice, those beautiful, romantic roads of crumbling stone and isolated walls immersed in the dirty canal water, and her mind is full. She's been here before, and yet somehow she's never really seen it. That's the way it is with everywhere she's been in the world she was born to save but has no time to explore. Even now, she can't linger. Still, somewhere, in the distance, music seeps through the streets, soft and sad and haunting and she can appreciate that, at least.

Buffy finds two vampires in an alley, laughing over the corpse of a fur-wrapped young man. When she leaves the alley, she's covered in dust and her fingers are cold from pressing the poor man's eyelids down. She whispers goodnight as she walks away, the Scythe's handle warm under her palms.

Angel finds her at the edge of the city, staring into the steaming water and humming along with the music of the streets. He says, "Faith hasn't been able to find anything. We took a look around but..."

Above them, the helicopter draws near, and Buffy raises her voice over the sound of its propeller, swiping hair from her eyes. "I didn't find anything either. There were a few stray vampires, but no demons, no witches. Satsu found a werewolf in a corner but that's about it." She looks at him. "Doesn't that mean..."

Angel looks at her from the side of his eye. "Generalizing supernatural phenomena."

Her stomach sinks, and her hands tense around the Scythe.

Satsu arrives with Faith and the shackled werewolf; Buffy doesn't know what to say to Faith, so she just mumbles her thanks as she scrambles into the copter, pulling the struggling woman-wolf behind her. Inside, Angel's face turns to the window, and Buffy traces his gaze to the tiny form of Faith waving from the ground. Around her, the air is filling up with steam from the waters. It looks like a drawing from one of Xander's comic books - picture of the heroine just before the world falls down.

Buffy rests her hand on Angel's as Faith disappears from view.

When they get back to Scotland, there's blood in the hallways. Crimson smears - fresh, and dark brown stains where blood has dried, too. Angel grabs an axe from the wall and Buffy moves The Scythe into a defensive position. The halls are quiet, abandoned still full of upturned furniture, with deep gashes through the softer woods - the tables, the chairs. Tracking the blood through the castle, they find five torn open bodies, and in the cellar, the guards set to watch over the werewolf prisoners, or patients, they're torn open too. The ground is littered with shards of glass, sparks of broken magic shimmering and dissipating into the air.

Angel picks up a shard, heavy and still buzzing with energy. "I thought you said they couldn't get through the glass."

Buffy shakes her head. "They couldn't."

Angel drives the glass hard into the stone wall. Chips of stone fall to the ground; the glass doesn't shatter.

Cold and hot panic surge through Buffy's blood in waves, and she searches the entire building, every inch. She finds most of the slayers shaking in the observation room, Xander serving drinks, Willow tending to wounds.

Kaya looks up, red-faced. "It was too fast. We didn't even have time to react," she says. "It was just too _fast_."

* * *

She doesn't know how they end up in her room, her legs tucked under her arms, her hair in her eyes and on her shoulders. She doesn't know how they got there, but Angel sits on the edge of her bed, inches from her, and she's glad they did.

Her room is still soft colors and light woods; a haven of warmth amidst the stone walls. Angel says, "You never change." He smiles, and she almost thinks that's a good thing.

"Someone's got to be dependable, right? It used to be good old dependable Will. Then she got with the magic mojo and now it's me." She wiggles her feet in their socks; outside the wind is blowing hard, and the trees shake their skeletal limbs. "I'm not that good at it, though. I wasn't really made to be a leader."

Angel shakes his head. "Yes, you were."

Buffy leans against the wall behind her bed. "How did you get out, anyway?"

Angel furrows his brow; it takes a moment to understand. Even when he does, it takes a moment to answer. Then, "A seventh generation witch." He watches her face, then picks up one of the smaller pillows that adorn the head of her bed. "We had to find books that would explain the spell. And then we had to raise witches. Teach them, teach their children. For seven generations." In his hands, the pillow bops a little from one side to the other. He watches it, instead of her.

Buffy stares at him. "You were there for seven generations?"

He stops moving. "No. It took a few decades to find the books, figure out what to do with them, before we could start."

Suddenly, she wants to cry. She wants to hold him, or apologize for not being his hero. For not being able to find him, to march into Hell and pull him back. But she doesn't know what to say, and she can't move. Maybe she's been General Buffy for so long she's forgotten how to be woman Buffy, girl Buffy. The Buffy that laughed and cried and loved...

Loved _him_. She watches him in his silence and isolation. The way he's alone, even in a room of people, even with her.

The air is chilly - castles are drafty, and Buffy pulls a blanket around her shoulders; Angel adjusts it, tucking it closer to her chin. His skin is cool, like the air. She says, "When I found out you were working with Wolfram and Hart, I guess I kind of assumed you went--"

"Bad again?" He draws away, slowly.

"Yeah. I should have had more faith in you."

"Not really." He shakes his head. "Buffy, you weren't wrong. I mean you were wrong about my intentions, but not about what I was doing. I thought Wolfram and Hart could be... like the demon in me. A force of evil, put to good use by a soul. My soul. Yeah. I was in a bit over my head. It was too much for me. So I tried to undo it, and..."

"That went icky too."

He laughs, very quietly, almost silent. "Yeah. It went icky."

"That seems to be a theme. When good thoughts go icky." Surrounded by blankets and him, she feels so warm. "Where's Spike disappeared to, anyway?"

"I don't keep track of him. I don't keep track of any of them."

"Oh." She thinks of Spike, his bleached hair and long coat - the status symbol he cast off once, and then reclaimed. "Well, he'll turn up," She says, "He's _Spike_. He's like a bad case of the flu or something, he just keeps coming back and you think you're away from him and then boom you're all oogly again."

Angel looks at her. "You're oogly? About Spike?"

"It was just an example." Buffy looks up at the ceiling. She thinks about Spike's hands on her back, his mouth on her mouth, and she shudders from revulsion, desire, remembrance. Some combination of the three. It's weird how, with him, her heart is always mixed. Until him, she never thought you could almost love someone, and almost like them. You either did, or you didn't. That's how it made sense, wasn't it? Sometimes, she wonders if he remembers her.

Angel says, "I saw some old papers the other day. About you."

"Oh yeah. I'm totally a terrorist." She shrugs. "At least that's what I hear."

He smiles. "You are pretty terrifying."

"Only when I'm filled with wrathy vengeance."

Angel tugs the edge of her blanket. "You're pretty scary at other times, too."

* * *

When Buffy was a little girl, her social studies teacher put aside an entire section on mythologies of the ancient world. Zeus and Hera, Ra and Isis, Thor and Odin. She was eight, or maybe nine, and they used the old Encyclopedias in the back of the classroom to look up the Gods, and tell their myths. Their quarter-year project was a paper on the pantheon of their choice, or a myth that spanned multiple mythologies, like the floods that recur in so many stories of old, or the end of the world.

Buffy wrote about the creation of the universe. She doodled illustrations in the margins and pasted drawings over the top halves of pages - chaos giving birth to Gaea, and the sculpting of man from clays. She was fascinated by it all, these stories of creation and destruction, birth and rebirth, and she wished people still cared about Zeus and about Hera; about these gods of old worlds.

A little over ten years later, she met her first god.

Glory didn't really live up to the hype.

She's almost thirty, now, and she knows that folklore can be real. She's met Hansel and Gretel, after all; she's met Dracula (twice). And maybe somewhere out there, the other Gods do exist - the ones the people know. Or maybe they were just witches and warlocks; maybe they were demons.

Angel tells her about Illyria, sometimes, and how she was the God of Gods, the King of Death, the master of all, and how now she's just an immortal living in a human body, holding it together with the remnants of her power. But it's better that than dead, at least in theory. Immortals fight so hard to survive; harder than mortals - what's the loss of a few decades compared to the loss of forever? Maybe that's why so many of them are cowards.

And who could blame them? Why risk death, if you don't have to die?

Why face the void, if you don't have to?

* * *

When he sleeps he's so quiet, so still. It's like she's lying next to a corpse. She tries not to think about that too much. There are a world of reasons not to.

And Buffy knows he doesn't need to sleep at all, he just chooses to, sometimes. He doesn't want to spend hours in a world he can't join, and he doesn't want to spend hours alone. So he sleeps. And he's not alone now, with her there - though he is over the covers and she is under them, it's as close as they've ever been and she drapes her arm across his chest before she closes her eyes.

In her dreams, the world is still and a shadow creeps across the sky, blots out the sun. The shadow has red eyes, burning in the pitch-black of its face, its face like a dog's, like a wolf's.

And in her dreams, she hears the music again, like that night in Venice, still echoing in her head. The soundtrack of the end of days.

It's strange, but she doesn't wake up afraid.

It's 10 in the morning, and the sky is still black.

 

**Six.**

(They lie on her bed over the covers, hands entwined, staring at the ceiling. The light is golden and low, and the shadows scatter over the floor, lingering in corners and between the stones. She looks golden too, tonight.

"Angel. Do you believe in um, you know. All those crazy myths about the ferrymen, and the river of the dead?"

Charon, the river Styx. He learned those myths in his years of wandering, tasting the world with Darla, with Spike and Drusilla. He remembers how a universe opened up to him, then - a great flood of things he never knew in his years as the drunken man he had been, and in his great hunger he swallowed every story, every echo of the world he had now become a part of - that world of things he hadn't believed in, once.

"In a way. I've seen it. But nothing is ever as obvious as the myths make them out to be. The ancients didn't understand the other worlds any more than people do today. They only noticed it was there because they hadn't filled their minds with science, yet."

Over time, it lost a bit of its glamour.

"My 8th grade science teacher would be universes of offended."

"He shouldn't be. He-- He?"

Castle life, it's not that bad.

"She."

"She. I'm not saying science is wrong, Buffy. I'm just saying it's a mistake to assume that's all there is."

"Hey, I'm totally aware. Plus, you're talking to the very definition of scientific anomaly. I was just wondering..."

Except now there's the ghosts in the air. The slayers killed in their home. The chill of wind through the echoing corridors.

"If the world really is ending, do I have to keep a quarter in my pocket all the time?"

Angel laughs, and he hasn't laughed, truly laughed, in years. At least not in her presence.

"It wouldn't hurt."

She buries her head against his shoulder; her skin warm, her breath soft, laughing with him. He touches the back of her neck - warm skin and peach fuzz - and she trembles slightly at his touch. And he doesn't know when this happened, this strange and casual closeness, this dance along the edges of temptation. It may just be proof of what he's known all along: that it was better to be away. That if they were near each other, they would always fall together, for better or worse.

The air is thick and heavy on his chest. Buffy closes her eyes.

She says, "I don't really want to die, though." Her voice is small. He doesn't know what she's afraid of. It isn't death itself, he knows - she's seen it often enough to understand that death is not an ending, that she won't disappear even if she's gone. But even still she's entitled to fear, he thinks, everyone's entitled to that. So he pulls her a little closer, envelopes her in his arms, and she squeezes him just a little tighter than he does her.

She says, "I don't want _you_ to die." Her voice is smaller still. Almost inaudible, even to him. And he understands. Her fear of endings, of separation again. The shattering of the tentative bond stretched between them. Because it's always pain with them, pain and the cut of the forbidden. He doesn't remember everything, but he remembers that cold realization: her notebooks covered in high school promises of forever, things she didn't want him to see but didn't think he would object to if he did. He remembers saying goodbye in the only way he could - no words, no touch. If he said one thing he would falter. If he heard her voice. He remembers that.

The light falls against his face; Buffy's hand is warm in his.

He's still holding her fingers in his palm when she falls asleep.)

* * *

On a Friday they meet in the conference room, gathered around the massive table, Giles at the head, Xander at the foot. Buffy lingers near Xander, but she turns her chair to face Giles. Maybe one day she'll figure out what she thinks of Giles, these days. Of course, for the moment, it doesn't matter. Her mind is cluttered with dark dreams and visions, and the blotting out of the sun; her ears are full of Giles' voice as he tells them that all of the mythologies are right, and then he tells them that all of the mythologies are wrong.

"Every culture looked at what they saw through the lens of their own understandings," he says, "So of course... a warrior culture envisions a great battle, and a culture that worshipped the sun might envision... the extinguishing of the sun."

"Oh great," Xander says, "A culture of Cordelias." Angel glares at him, and Xander mutters something quiet, inaudible.

Buffy glances from Xander to Angel, with their universes of difference and their odd similarity, too: they'd both loved Cordelia, in their time, just as they'd both loved Buffy herself. Though one had attained what the other only wished for with Cordy, and then with her, the reverse. Maybe that's cosmic equilibrium or something. Maybe Angel would have hit it off with Anya, if given the chance. The thought is kind of gross and creepy though, so she pushes her thoughts into the present.

Giles clears his throat. "Thank you for that charming detour into ten years ago, Xander, but I was trying to make the point that we may not find an exact prediction for this... specific crisis. We may find pieces of it scattered over many mythologies, many prophecies, and many legends. Interpreted... accurately, or inaccurately. It's difficult to know where to begin."

Willow wraps her fingers around a hot mug of herbal tea, and her eyes are shadowed and grim. "I dreamt about Tara. Last night. It was so real, like I could touch her. I woke up calling for her. Kennedy wasn't happy." She lifts her vast eyes, gaze on Giles. "I thought I was over it. I mean, as much as you can be. I haven't dreamt about her in _years_."

Buffy looks at the table.

Giles frowns, "What did she say?"

"She said she came to say goodbye."

Buffy doesn't mention that she dreamt, too. She dreamt of Spike waving as he walked into the sunset, and his hair wasn't white anymore, it was just... blond. She dreamt of Kendra singing a funeral dirge around a fire in the desert of Buffy's nightmares - that barren world where she met the First Slayer, once, and in the caves of the Scythe's containment. In the very last moments before she woke, she dreamt of Faith.

_It's just a dream_ , she tells herself. Aside from Kendra, they aren't even dead.

Well, Spike is kind of dead. But still. It's just a dream.

* * *

When the Hellmouths start to yawn, Faith takes a team and heads back to Cleveland. In Rome, a Buffy double comes home in a body bag, and Buffy fends off the girl's angry Immortal lover for hours over the phone and then in the Conference room. She hangs up feeling like she's died again, and wishing she knew the double's name. Buffy sends Satsu to investigate Rome, after that. It makes sense that way: Faith lived in Cleveland, for a while, and Satsu stayed in Rome for a while, too, stationed with the Buffy-double who eventually became the Immortal's unlawfully wedded whatever. For a while.

As for Buffy herself, the real one, she volunteers to check Sunnydale. It just seems right. Of course, by all rights the Hellmouth in Sunnydale ought to be closed, kaput, shut forevermore. And yet the readings there are inconsistent but quite definitively not kaput. So maybe right doesn't have meaning anymore and Buffy should have just stayed in bed. Instead she and Angel drop down a pit God only knows how deep into the shadowy grave of their mutual former home. Well, her former home. Maybe he was only ever just a guest there.

All right, it's less a pit than a tunnel, dug by the government and upkept until the wolves came. Now the metal beams are rusting and creaking, and the muddy ground sloshes around their feet as they walk. Angel looks around the dark hole before Buffy lights an electric torch. What she wouldn't give for his night vision.

"Welcome back," she says.

"I have this weird habit of living in places that get swallowed by hell dimensions or collapse into hellmouths." Angel shakes his head and follows one step behind her through the rubble of overturned stoves and collapsed roofs. "This has got to be what Pompeii looked like."

Buffy glances back at him. "What?"

"Didn't you go to History class?"

"Forgive me, I had most of that stuff kicked out of me by demons." She holds the Scythe in one hand as she walks. "Volcano? In Italy."

"Yeah. Volcano in Italy."

Angel glances at her as they walk and even in the dark she feels his eyes on her. It's awkward, a little, and comfortable too; being here, being with him. It's almost like old times. Except for all the rubble and stuff, and how Sunnydale is in ruins. It's a strange, kind of heartbreaking thing to see. And it isn't that Buffy loved the town, really (although she did, in her way, a little). It's not that she misses all those midnight patrols through the graveyard (although she does a little bit, too). It's just that there's so much of her here, buried under tons of dirt and rock. Her house, and the school that replaced the school she went to. Sunnydale High II, the high school that only lived for a year. The Doublemeat Palace, and the Bronze. The broken headstones that mark the graves of dozens of vampires, now fallen into dust at her hand, and then... the crushed headstone of her mother.

Buffy stops there, palm against the cracked surface, and chokes back a sickening mingle of rage and grief. Angel presses his hands against her side, as if to hold her steady. She doesn't push him away, though she can stand on her own - she knows this even as she leans into him and doesn't cry.

"I kept reminding myself not to remember that she was here," Buffy says, and Angel strokes back her hair, tucking it behind her ear. His fingers are cool - not cold, not like ice, but cool like the air and soft too. Softer than she remembered. They always are. Vampires don't get calluses.

Angel says, "She's not just here. She's with you, too."

Buffy shakes her head. "That's really Celebrate-the-moments-of-our-lives of you. I am brimming with warm fuzzies and skepticism." She sighs a little. "But thanks."

Somewhere, covered in rubble, probably unrecognizable, her house is lost in the aftermath of war - the bedroom where Dawn grew up (didn't grow up), and the window where Angel kissed her that night when she wasn't allowed to leave the house. She tries not to think too hard about those things - the world they left behind when they saved the rest of it.

They sit in the dirt by her mother's grave, and Buffy brushes the soil from its surface, staring at the granite words - Joyce Summers. Beloved Mother. She leans against Angel's chest, wrapped in his coat the way she was after the funeral, when everything went cold and empty, and she wanted him to stay until the sun burnt out and fell into the sea. It's fitting, in a way, that he was there when that actually happened, in a metaphorical sense.

Angel's fingers rest in her hair, and she closes her eyes against the trace trickles of light, and her ears against the silence. She says, "Tell me about Connor."

For a long time, Angel doesn't say anything. He grows still, his fingers wrapped in her hair. "He was my son."

"I know. But he's gone now."

"I'm immortal. He wasn't." His hands withdraw, and the stuffy air is emptier now. Angel's face is drawn, and he looks away. "He's been gone before. I killed him, once. To save him. He was so angry, so... screwed up, he was a screwed up kid. It was my fault, Buffy, I should have protected him. I should have guided him. Instead, all I could do was let him go crazy and then let him go." His hand closes, a loose fist. "Like father like son."

She doesn't know if he means that Connor was like him, or that he was like his father. Sometimes, she remembers that, as well as she knows him, she doesn't know much _about_ him - the him that was before there was a them. Or even the one that came after, developing in that office in LA, or in those magical windows of Wolfram and Hart. But she wraps her fingers around his hand, and hopes he takes comfort in her touch the way she has in his, a thousand times before tonight, and even here, now. Sitting on the ruins of her mother's grave.

They stay still for a while, maybe for too long, before they return to their duties. Across the broken street from the Bronze, she says, "It's easier not to miss stuff when you don't have to see it."

"Tell me about it." Angel's gaze is heavy on her shoulders.

Sometimes, when they're together, she still can't quite breathe. But she has to breathe; she has to walk. Through the dead and silent Bronze and the warehouse where Spike lived during his first time in Sunnydale. Down the street she walked with Angel while the snow fell, pale and silent, over the unnaturally dark roads. Through the shattered corpse of the new Sunnydale High School.

Buffy isn't sure what they're searching for - some sign of life or magic in this dead place. Something to explain the bizarre readings. But they turn corners and walk through shattered stone and still there is nothing.

They've almost given up searching when they hear the hiss.

 

* * *

(He carries her back to ground level, and he doesn't remember how he got there. He signals the helicopter and doesn't remember that, either. He remembers the bitter sting of wind on his face, and the blood dripping over his hands. He remembers hearing her scream.

Her head rests against his shoulders, and Angel tells her it's all right. She killed the thing, that... monster, whatever the hell it was. And now she's going to be all right. He tells her he brought that damn axe back too. Buffy shudders and says it's called the Scythe.

Angel closes his eyes, squeezes her hand. He says, "You're _going_ to be all right.")

 

 

**Seven.**

 

(In Scotland, they stretch her out across the table, and Xander says, "Will can't fix it; there's something blocking her power on Buffy."

Giles says, "Demon magic."

And Angel, he sits at Buffy's bedside, and she's still asleep. Her skin is cold and pale, her fingers limp inside his, but she's still breathing and he hears her heartbeat.

Xander wants to know what happened, and it takes too long for Angel to collect his thoughts and understand the question. It was a snake-thing, he says, something huge and silent, except the hissing. And how does something that large move that quickly, that quietly? He asks himself these things, though he already knows that demons, true demons, are strange things, different things - subject to different rules, different physics, really.

Willow presses her palm against Buffy's forehead and says, "I can't help her," in that choked up voice Angel had almost forgotten.

Buffy's skin is cold and clammy, damp with sweat.

Xander says, "It's all right, Will. She's always all right."

Angel doesn't point out how untrue that is. He doesn't want to believe it, himself.

And Angel doesn't sleep, he doesn't need to, after all. He's at her side when the others have drifted off in their chairs or gone to bed. Dawn stays at her side, curled up in the chair Angel abandoned for her comfort, and he sits on the floor by Buffy's bedside watching the lamplight on the walls, watching the shadows. He's spent so much of his life watching shadows that sometimes he forgets how much brightness she brings in her wake. That glow he loved so much, from the moment he first saw her face and forever after. It's a rare thing, someone who can promise forever, and mean it.

So he sits beside her, and listens to her heartbeat - weak but steady, comforting in its presence - and thinks of how it's always life or death, with them.

He says, "I shouldn't have left you," even though he knows he should have. He says it because he thinks she might want to hear it, although she can't.

He says, "You have to come back, Buffy." Because he's lost too many people already. And if she comes back, if she opens her eyes, he knows he'll never walk away again. He knows just as surely as he knows that he probably should. But she's everything - all there is - her breath and her eyes, her voice and the curve of her spine and her fingertips wrapped around the Scythe, wrapped around the edges of tabletops and around his fingers too when they speak without speaking, like they've always done.

The days stretch on, and Angel loses count. Her heartbeat grows stronger, but she doesn't open her eyes. Next to her, he watches her sleep while Dawn paints Buffy's fingernails with tears in her eyes.

He tells her that Willow says the magic is fading around her; she'll survive. She'll wake up.

No one is surprised. They all knew she was strong.

He's next to her when the last act begins.

It starts with the earthquakes, in the hours before the ground splits open and the volcanoes roar. Angel holds Buffy's hand through the shaking of the castle walls, the bricks that splinter and stones that bent and break. When he finally moves away, into the monitoring rooms, the screens are flooded with news reports, screaming people, the ever-droning voice of Mr. Preacherman. For the first time, he realizes he doesn't know Mr. Preacherman's actual name.

Xander leans his weight against the computer surfaces, and Angel knows he should be out there, fighting. He should be protecting. He's a champion. He almost remembers when that meant something.

The monitors flicker to the blue haired demon woman marching through slayer defenses, her armor torn, her hands shaking. One arm draped across her shoulders, Spike is holding her up, or being held up by her.

When Illyria appears in the doorway, Angel says, "What the hell is going on out there?"

Spike says, "It's a sodding bloodbath out there."

And Illyria looks at him with her burning, dead eyes. She says, "It's the end of time.")

* * *

Buffy wakes up at 4:56am, Monday morning. The room is warm, she knows this before she understands what's happening, and she sees the light through her lids but can't open her eyes. She can't move. And all she can think is, it's like one of those horrible movies where some guy is under general anesthesia but he's still awake, or his mind is conscious inside his corpse. She tells herself that's kind of grim, but still the image lingers.

Somewhere, far away, competing voices duel for her attention, or maybe they just coexist. One tells her the end is near, and the other... if she follows it, she knows it will bring her home.

Then, fingers wrap their way around hers, and she opens her eyes.

Angel's hand is warmer against her skin, encircling hers. And they fit together so well, those hands. Despite everything.

Somewhere in the room, Mr. Preacherman's voice carries from the radio, or from the television that wasn't there the last time she was awake. He hisses out his words of fear, but Buffy isn't afraid, not anymore. Angel's fingers tickle the inside of her hand, and there are centuries between them, but she isn't afraid of that anymore, either. She feels warm, oven-warm, and soft despite the chills of venom in her blood, still burning a little, fading away.

Just for this moment she thinks it doesn't matter, maybe, if the world is ending.

Mr. Preacherman says, "Look to the skies." He says, "Now is the time to look for salvation."

And Angel says, "You're awake."

**Eight.**

 

(Angel thinks back centuries, sometimes, though the gauzy haze of remembering sometimes makes him afraid. Even so, he doesn't feel the years weighing down his bones anymore when he's with her, in the golden tint of her bedroom - their bedroom, now that he's abandoned his old, colder quarters. If they still call them quarters. Whatever they're called, he's more at home than he ever has been inside the room they share in their strange, chaste romance, separated by sheets and time.

Tonight, the windows grow darker with the silhouette of their guardian, the dragon he's known for longer than she's been alive, and still only a handful of years. The folds of time, they confound sometimes.

"I had a dream once," he says.

On his chest, Buffy's fingers twitch, flex. On his shoulder, he feels her breath, and it ruffles the stray locks of hair scattered across his skin, her face.

"What, only one?" She looks up at him, and she is in the light of the moon and the shadow of dragon's wings.

He pushes back the hair from her eyes. "Funny," he says. "Actually, I don't dream that much."

"You mean you don't remember them much."

"No," he says, "I don't dream."

Buffy's lips purse, and her eyes are hazy, too, like his mind when he thinks too far back. "I guess it's a vampire thing."

"Yeah, I guess."

She rolls aside, inches away. "Okay, so you had dreamytime. And?"

_The golden light, and her face in the sun._  
  
"I became human. For one day."

Buffy raises her eyebrows. "You only dreamt about that once? I find _that_ suspicious at best."

"Plenty of times. But this one is especially clear." In truth, he's dreamed of it a thousand times, maybe more. But so many of them were just redos. Versions of the first where he said something differently, versions where he told her, or where he chose something else. Another path...

Buffy yawns, and stretches her legs out in, twisting into his. "So what happened in this amazing dream?"

...the road not taken.

"I gave it all back. The day. The humanity. The Powers that Be took away my breath, and no one knew but me. I would carry the burden forever, knowing what could have been." _Ice cream and peanut butter, or was it chocolate? It's been so long, but he'll always remember. Kisses in the sunlight, and the sharp scent of sewage, and his own blood in his mouth - the all-too human pain of body, of soul. Of sacrifice._ "You said you'd felt my heartbeat, and you'd never forget."

Her breath quickens, her skin warms. Buffy closes her eyes. "And then what?"

"You forgot."

Buffy opens one eye and looks at him. "Shrinks would have like, a field day with that kind of thing."

It breaks the moment, just like that. The tension drains from the air, and he's mostly grateful. Still, he can't quite smile. "Yeah, I guess they would."

Next to him, on top of him, Buffy moves a bit, shifts her place. "Even in your dreams you don't give yourself happy endings. Color me all... shocky."

Really, he doesn't believe in happy endings. He's not sure he believes in endings at all.)

* * *

They lose Spike only a few weeks after he's come back into the fold and for once, Buffy has no words. She feels a little ill, a little lost, and she pushes down the sudden urge to strike something. It would almost be all right, really, but when she looks to Angel for comfort, she sees nothing but the reflection of her own ache. It's hard to remember, sometimes, how the two of them had a history before she was even born. Before her mother was born. Opposites and the same, brothers and friends and enemies - it's hard to know how he feels, and impossible to guess who feels more, between them.

Then Giles says, "I'm afraid we've lost Faith as well."

_Opposites and the same, sisters and friends and enemies._ She feels blank, and Angel's face is ashen, grey skin and dead eyes. Buffy squeezes his hand, knowing it's a cold comfort, or no comfort, for either of them.

When they're alone together again, in the tiny space of her room that once seemed so large, Angel brings her painkillers to dull the throbbing of her body as it fights off the last of the demon snake venom. Her skin is red and enflamed around the long-closed but still scarred bite wounds, and she swallows the pills down in silence while Angel paces across the stone floor, a black shadow against the light grey walls.

She says, "It's not like I've never lost anyone before." But in her head the sentence is incomplete. She's lost too many people, and the ache never stops, it just gets worse. Sometimes she wonders if her father still thinks of her - if he ever wonders where she is, or if she died in Sunnydale. She wonders if he's relieved that she's gone, the burden of his abandonment guilt soothed in one cataclysmic collapse of road and brick, mortar and trees.

Angel stops moving, watching her instead. He's pale skin and dark hair, a system of contrasts painted gold by her yellow bedroom lights. "He was the first..." he trips on the words, just a bit, "The first boyfriend you lost."

"That's not true." She shakes her head. "I lost you. A lot of times."

"That was different. And Faith. She was your sis--"

"She was _not_ my sister."

"She was your other half, Buffy. Dark to your light. What you could have been if you'd been--"

"A lunatic?"

"...different. Born into a different place, with different parents. I know you didn't always like her, Buffy. But I know you understood her, too. And I understand how you feel."

Mostly, she feels ill. And young. And small in a way she hasn't felt in years, despite the inexorable endgame that is the world these days, that world that's trying to reject them, or shake them off, or... something. She feels angry and lost and she wants to break the furniture, break the sky. She feels a lot of things, and she averts her eyes, because somehow his compassion is worse than coldness could ever be.

Angel says, "Buffy..."

She hides the bottom half of her face behind her knees. "You don't understand how I feel. What do you know about--" _Loss._ She catches herself just before the word passes her lips, and now she's angry again, but mostly at herself.

If there's anyone who knows loss better than she does, it's him.

Across the room, Angel's gaze doesn't waver, though his lips tighten, his muscles stiffen. He says, "I'm gonna try to forget you said that."

Life is a maze. An inscrutable, endless series of corridors and passageways and she can't... "I can't find the exit," she says. "Sorry. I guess I'm having a moment of stupid."

Angel sits on the edge of her bed with her, his palm resting on her knee. "What exit?"

"To the maze, I guess." Buffy closes her eyes, and the room is filled with harp music, drifting from the television - something soft and familiar. It's soothing, and she's so tired. She moves back and leans against the headboard, skin cold and tingly. "People keep going away, Angel. You, and my dad. My mom. Tara. Now Spike, Faith. Not to mention all the slayers, I can't even name them or we'll be here all night. Giles used to say the slayer was supposed to be alone, but I didn't know..."

And then Angel is at her side, next to her on the bed. His fingers lace through hers. He doesn't say she isn't alone, though she feels the words in his skin. He doesn't say that the castle, their headquarters, is filled with a small army of girls who will follow her into hell, if that's what it takes. He doesn't say that she still has her friends, that same circle she's always had. She still has him. And Buffy knows that he doesn't say it because there are no guarantees. Tomorrow, Giles could be saying they've lost Angel, too, or maybe it will be Xander saying it because maybe they'll lose Giles, as well. No guarantees.

But hopes.

Buffy says, "I wish I'd met Connor."

Angel closes his eyes. "So do I."

Mister Preacherman's voice drifts through the room. "Repent," he says, "The sinner will be sacrificed on the grave of the earth, but through the righteous comes salvation." Behind him, the harp music slows, it turns, it twists. It's like a lullaby. Or a requiem.

Buffy's eyes snap open and she lifts her head. "Angel," she says, "Who turned on the TV?"

* * *

  
"The first time I heard it was in Venice. I thought it was coming from someone's house."

Giles flips open a book. Seated at the head of the kitchen table, for a moment, Buffy is a teenager again, huddled with her friends in the Sunnydale High library, gathered around the desk. It's always been kind of weird, she thinks, how no one ever wondered about that until it was too late.

"I found a reference to harp music signaling the end of days," Giles says. "It's connected to Ragnarok, along with references to the snake that encircles the world--"

Xander lights up. "The midgard serpent!" Sheepishly, he adds, "Thor comics bring good things!"

Dawn wrinkles her nose. "So do mythology books. We studied that in, like, grade school."

(That, she thinks, is the main difference - Dawn, no longer a teenager, not that she's ever been one, and here instead of at the Junior High she never attended. The more normal Buffy's world seems, the more she remembers its weirdness.)

Giles turns the page. "Yes, that's all very fascinating. So, the snake which encircles the world, that's... yes, the Midgard Serpent. I suppose that must be what you encountered in Sunnydale."

Buffy rubs her leg, where she still feels the burn of its fangs. "It was pretty big, but I don't think it was world-circling big."

Willow shakes her head. "Hyperbole. Just like I don't think the music is really played by... giant herdsman making with the happy grimness. But it says the moon and sun will be eaten by wolves. I haven't seen any of that either."

"I have." Buffy pushes a pencil across the table. "In a dream right before the world went dark. Giles. Are you telling me we're dealing with Ragnarok? Seriously?"

Giles takes off his glasses, glancing down. "Well, not... exactly, Buffy. As I mentioned earlier, no one culture predicted everything. There's a reference in Norse mythologies as well as the Mayan Culture to the rebirth of the world, which certainly makes sense. The world goes through cycles. Eras, one might say - ah, there was the age of the Old Ones, and the age of mortals... it seems the world is trying to enter a new age, now."

Buffy presses her lips together. "And what does Mister Preacherman have to do with this?"

"I'm afraid I don't know. He could be an old one in human skin, such as Angel's friend Illyria. He could be a hybrid demon, a god. An opportunistic human. One never knows. It's impossible to know, unless we investigate him directly. However..." Giles takes a moment then, glancing at the book. "It's worth mentioning that if the Mayans were correct, the rebirth of the world will happen only in the pain of sinners, and the sacrifice of the righteous. And that a god would walk in human form, which seems to imply if he is anything, it is probably..."

Deep in Buffy's gut, something twists. She feels Angel's hands heavy on her shoulders. "Another god."

"Indeed." Giles closes his book. "And there is a date. December 21st, 2012." Giles looks up. "We don't have much time."

Buffy swallows, hard. "So there was that crazy who was making out with the First Evil, and now this. Clearly preachers are sucktastic and not to be trusted," she says, staring at her knees. "Okay. So we'd better get moving."

Xander says, "I hear he lives in New York."

* * *

One of the things that Buffy has come to learn over the years is that gods often have many names, many facets. In one culture, one may see a given deity (or demon, if indeed there is a difference, and she's never been entirely certain that there is) appear under a certain name and in another culture, the same entity might have another name, even another field of influence. A hell demon might become a death demon, a destruction demon, a demon of chaos, or mischief.

It's hard to tell why this happens. Giles claims it's a question of paradigms. Like the legends of the end of days, with its many names, and many symptoms, clashing symptoms. A view of reality filtered through the eyes of a specific place or culture. The reality is rarely as literal as the textbooks say.

Still, Buffy wonders who Mr. Preacherman is, and what he was called by this culture, or that. She wonders if she would recognize his names if she knew them or if, like Glory or Illyria, he would be something too old and too powerful for the mortals to know.

* * *

It doesn't take long to decide what to do. Buffy, being an advocate of the pick up a stick and stab it school of monster (or god) handling, pinpoints his Manhattan Penthouse and decides to take a group of slayers and Angel on a recon mission. They choose 6am on the first Sunday morning of December. Watching his schedule, they've determined that he goes out of during the first week of any given month. Besides, preachers are probably busy on Sunday doing their preacher thing.

Whatever that is.

Preaching, she guesses.

On Saturday night, Buffy is cold. She keeps the windows open in her bedroom, the curtains billowing inward like little parachutes whenever the air stirs, and she tucks her feet under the blankets and shivers. Against the wall lamps, Angel is a silhouette in black, his dark eyes tossing their gaze on her skin. She feels it there, the heavy weight of his concern, and the unbeating heart that's always stirred for her.

She wiggles her feet under the blankets and says, "Coming to bed?"

Angel shrugs off his coat, long and black the way it always was when they were young (or she was young). "In a minute."

She nods, rubbing her arms. "It's poley in here."

"Poley? Like... fireman poles?"

"No, like north or south. Like that. I should have Willow do a warming spell."

Angel sits on the edge of the bed and sheds his clothes, dropping them beside his feet. And tonight, it's the night before the end, she thinks, maybe. Or maybe just the night before they understand what the end is. Or maybe that's optimistic and when they get home, they won't know anything new at all.

His fingers find hers over the separation between them - the thin cotton sheets that block her body from his. He says, "I don't feel cold."

And Buffy's skin aches for something - a touch. Her ears ache for words, comfort, something else. Sometimes it's hard to figure out what she needs. But not this time. This time, the world is dying around them and they don't know how to save it. This time, they're eight hours from descending into the pit of a creature they can't define and the hours tick away in seconds, minutes. In a day they could be dead. In a week, the world itself could be gone, overrun by... something.

It's always a risk, Buffy thinks. God only knows what a new day brings. Especially now. So she tugs the sheet aside, sliding it out from beneath his legs as he moves into place, and her skin, bare and warm, brushes against his. The bed is cool and comforting in the space between them, like the cold side of a pillow on those restless nights when she tosses and turns and finds no rest. The nights when she bakes in her own body heat and her own anxiety, exhausted by her own racing mind.

Angel's lips find hers as she switches off the light, and his hands find her hips, her breasts. She remembers the first time - the only time, for them - in that apartment in Sunnydale where Angel kept his things - artifacts from another age. She was cold then, too, and scared, and he was going away. Sometimes it seems like he's always going away.

She pushes her fingers through his hair as they kiss, and pulls him nearer, and this time he won't escape. She's older now, over 30, the oldest Slayer since the beginning of slayers. But somehow, with him, a part of her is still seventeen, will always be seventeen. His eyes are bright spots in the dark room, filled with fire and longing. Really, nothing has changed.

She says, "The curse..."

Angel squeezes his eyes closed. "My son is dead," he says. "There's no such thing as absolute happiness for me now, Buffy."

Buffy's chest tightens along with her throat, and then it swells. He whispers something, asks if she's sure, and she is. She's never been more sure in her life. She's missed so much of him - even more than he's missed of her. She may never know him the way she did once, but his soul is the same - that mix and meld of the man and the demon. She knows that - the nobility of it, and the sadness. She knows his fingers too, and the way they trace lines over her skin, and the touch of his tongue against hers as she pulls the blankets up over their bodies, blocking out the cold.

The clock ticks. Another minute gone.

**Nine.**

( _Connor. Cordelia. Spike. Doyle. Wesley. Gunn. Darla._

When Angel closes his eyes to sleep, he doesn't fear for his soul.)

* * *

They go through the sewers, Buffy and Angel, Jill and Satsu, and it's like something in a lame movie about breaking into banks through the sewers. Buffy keeps The Scythe gripped between her hands and Satsu holds the light above their heads, looking for vampires, demons, guardians. Whoever might be lurking in the quiet places near Mr. Preacherman's building, above or below ground. But the silence is deafening, and along with the half-hearted squeak of rats, there is only their footsteps, and their breath.

Angel walks beside her, his trenchcoat stirring with every step. She sees it dance in the shadows thrown against the walls, and for a moment they're back in her bedroom, his lips on her throat, the cool touch of his hands. She shivers from every bit of her, the memory a tickle in the corners of her mind. But this is not the time, and she pushes it away.

Not that she'd rather be here, in the green and slimy corridors, assaulted with the stink of sewage, the cold air, the rats. The tunnel turns, then forks, and behind her, Jill looks over their maps. She's shaking with nerves. She's new.

"It's this way," Jill says, nodding a little to the left. Buffy follows, Angel's hand resting on the small of her back like something casual and ever-there. Like the world hasn't changed just by his being there, instead of in LA, in Hell. It's not really surprising. He's always been there, in his way.

When they reach the gratings beneath Park Avenue, Buffy stares up into dark empty space through the holes and the metal. Above their heads, she can hear something moving. Slithering. The weight of its body, sliding over cement floors, rubbing past the walls.

Next to her ear, Angel says, "Stay here," before he pushes the grating up and jumps into the space above them. And Buffy's never stood still through a fight. She's never let anyone battle instead of her. She shouts his name as she climbs above, into the heat and the dark. Beneath her, Satsu's light sways and flickers and Buffy feels thick skin, scaled or armored or something in between, as it slithers past her legs, tearing skin from her calf. In her head, the hissing begins. Somewhere, across the blank space of whatever basement hell they're in, she hears Angel shout her name just before claws sink into her back.

Buffy tumbles forward, and rolls out of the way of another flash of fur and claws. The space turns light with Satsu's arrival, her light flashing over long coils of body, the snake that encircled the world. On its side, an ancient gash scars its skin, chipped through scales as thick as plates, as hard as steel. The place where the Scythe connected months ago. Her wound burns. She knows it's the snake from Sunnydale, that thing she thought she'd killed.

"Satsu," she says, "Stay away from its face." And then the wolf is upon her.

It isn't a wolf, really. It isn't a man. It's something other, shifting from form to form without truly changing. Watching it move is like watching illusions through a trap of lenses and mirrors - from this angle, tall and slim, a canine of a man, handsome with his slicked back hair black as night. A lawyer, or politician. Flash, now he is fur and teeth, snout and claws. Flash, and back. A shifting mirage. Buffy's blood trickles down her back as she swings the Scythe at his head and behind her Satsu imbeds a sword in the wolf-thing's leg, but it doesn't slow, it doesn't stop. In its left eye, she sees the sad, subtle reflection of the swallowed moon. In its right, the burning glow of the blotted out sun.

The snake says, "We've waited for you." Its voice is a hissing sound as amorphous as the wolf's body, shifting from human to snake with different angles. It's like the snake-thing's body, too, in the light - angles and planes, a woman here and here, a serpent thing.

Satsu breaks a dagger against the wolf's back; it flinches then, barely. Quick, but slowly enough to allow Buffy to get to her feet again.

There are no easy quips, this time, just the struggle of fingers and claws, weapons and fur and skin. The wolf thing moves like quicksilver, and Buffy feels like she's in the alleyway in the last year of Sunnydale's life, again, fighting the Turok-han, this creature with skin like stone that breaks her to pieces without a thought. In the flash of metal, in the heaving of her own breath, she nearly misses the snake's teeth as they lunge for her gut.

Angel doesn't. He's in front of her, hands prying open the snake's jaws, his face all ridges and all demon. "Buffy," he says, "Get out of here. This thing can't poison me."

She wants to object, but the wolf-man disappears through the barely visible doorway across the basement floor, past washing machines and dryers and the scattered corpses of roaches and mice. She hears its growl as it runs through the hallways, its steps and its breath in the walls, in the air, and she follows. Yards away, Angel says, "I'll be right behind you."

Buffy jumps up flights of stairs three and four steps at a time, and Satsu shadows her footsteps. On the fourth floor, she sees its shadows two flights above their head in the endless stairwell, and mutters, "Why can't monsters ever use the elevator?" If it's heading to the penthouse, she knows, this will be a long run.

By the 20th floor, she hears the music.

At first, she thinks it's a dream. A hallucination - a memory. The mourning strains of the harp signaling the end of days. Then Satsu swears beneath her heaving breath and Buffy knows it's there. Growing louder as they ascend, mingling with their thoughts, moving their heart in its rhythm, with its time. And Buffy doesn't know when she stopped hearing the wolf-thing run, when its footsteps faded into harp strings, but now all she hears is music and the wheeze of her own inhalations.

On the 30th floor, she reaches the top of the staircase.

Behind her, Satsu's footsteps draw close, and then stop. The door is open into a black landscape of shifting shapes and emptiness. In the room beyond, if it is a room, she can hear the scrape of claws against... something. Concrete, perhaps, or something else. Stone.

Buffy narrows her eyes. "Jill," she says, "Call for back up." And then she steps into the darkness.

Inside, the door disappears. The walls are gone. Around her, she feels the movement of something else - something large. The wolf-thing, probably, circling her in rhythm with the music that wells up out of the blackness. All around her, the click of claws and paws and the pull, the strum, of strings. Buffy tracks the wolf's movements, or she tries, but the world shifts around her like a mirage, and one moment it's here and then there, and then nowhere at all.

But she feels changes. Somewhere in her blood, the demon-bound thing that she is, responding to the darkness. And in the distance, footsteps drawing closer - from behind, the light steps of Satsu, and from ahead heavier steps, but unmistakably human.

Satsu appears from nowhere and grips Buffy's arm, a little squeeze. "They're on their way." Hopefully, the door will still be there when they arrive.

When Mr. Preacherman emerges from the darkness, he's smaller than Buffy thought he would be. And then he isn't. He's blond, and he's slim, like the man on television, and then he's muscles, he's dark haired, his eyes burn. At his side, the wolf-thing shakes and clings, on four legs or on two.

One look at him, and Buffy understands.

"So," she says, "You're the god setting up shop around here."

Mr. Preacherman smiles with his teeth like fangs, they're perfect and white and sharp like little nails, like vampire's teeth, for the moment before they're perfect again. "It took you too long to find me."

And the Ragnarok myth spoke of the end of days, heralded by the return of Loki, the great trickster, harbinger of doom, Eris the goddess of discord, Coyote the prankster spirit. The Old Ones, Buffy knows, they had no sex, only magic and eyes and sprawling bodies the size of cities and power that made the world tremble when they moved like how the ground shivers under her feet when he moves. And his movements are music, his voice is a melody. From the shadows, the whisper of harp strings.

"You think you can stop this?" he says, from in front of her, or from behind. "This is the changing of the world, little slayer. " Somewhere nearby, unseen, he says "The Old Ones are returning... to remake the world in our image."

(Buffy squeezes her eyes closed, listening... to the echo of his voice, to the beating of her heart in her ears, and the music seeping through her veins like snake venom.)

"Every era," he says, "Must come to an end, in time."

(He circles behind her. Satsu whispers her name.)

"Every world must return to its parents, in the end."

(Buffy opens her eyes.)

"Not on my watch."

The Scythe is a swirl of crimson metal and it finds Mr. Preacherman's flesh with a twist of Buffy's body. And with that, the wolf-thing leaps. Satsu blocks it, sword flashing, and Buffy pushes her quarry away, farther from Satsu, trying to break the battle apart.

Mr. Preacherman's eyes glow a sickly green, like the blood trickling through his pale fingertips from the wound in his side. "Impressive, little girl. And yet, not enough." He grabs the blade between his hands when she strikes again, pushing her away.

"Aren't you supposed to be out of town?" She kicks her foot into his gut and he stumbles back two steps.

Grinning, he says, "I am."

"Great. Leave it the Slayerbrigade to misjudge the location of a transdimensional demon. I'll have to talk to Giles about that."

"You won't talk at all."

Buffy rolls her eyes, swings the Scythe. "Do you guys have a big book of boring bad guy lines? Because I swear, the next time I hear that one--"

His hand collides with her face, his fingers digging into her cheekbones, her skin. She inhales, and the smell of his skin is sulfur and music, and her flesh burns with the fire of a thousand gazes. Something, she doesn't know what (him?), it's in her body, in her brain, searching. Flipping through the book of her soul, a leisurely perusal that that takes a thousand years inside a single breath. When he lets go, she stumbles backwards, and falls.

"You are righteous," he says, "But you are not innocent."

And Buffy can't breathe, can barely move. Above her, Mr. Preacherman looms like a mountain, and now his skin is white like the mountainside too, his hair long and heavy and black like Satsu's. She wants to scream, but there's heat in her mouth, in her tongue. From somewhere far away, she hears the cracking, the shattering, of wood and glass.

Buffy looks up.

She says, "The Cavalry," as the room is flooded with slayers.

When the wolf-thing falls, the world shakes with its shuddering howl. Mr. Preacherman turns, his blond hair swishing, his demon-red skin glistening in the strange, surreal light of the abstract landscape. "Fenrir." His voice breaks apart like china as he starts in the direction of the wolf's cry. Buffy pushes herself to her feet and hacks across his back, the Scythe parting flesh and skin and bone. But Loki, Coyote, Eris, the faceless creator of destruction whatever he is, he snarls and shoves her aside as he pushes through the smoke and the gathered army of women.

In Buffy's mind, the music shifts, and Preacherman shouts, "My son!"

But in the path he carves through the slayers, in the center of their war, there is no wolf with the sun and the moon in its eyes. There is no creature shifting between forms, no everchanging prism. There is only the broken form of a well-coiffed man, his black hair slicked back, and his fingers red with blood.

Preacherman screams, and they're upon him.

Buffy screams, "Don't touch his skin," as she passes the Scythe from slayer to slayer as they strike at his most vulnerable places - his tendons, his groin, but his body changes, it shifts beneath them, quicksand, and where one wound opens another vanishes. His hands are quick too, and Buffy's face is splattered with the blood of friends, of allies. Soon, it's covered in her own as well, when his newly formed claws rake through her shoulder and chest. She moves behind him, pinning an arm.

Next to her, Satsu grabs his other arm, and Buffy shouts, "Someone--"

Angel says, "Gladly," as he strikes Preacherman in the face.

Buffy doesn't have the time to tell him to stop.

And there is a reason for slow-motion in films. That strange, unnatural approximation of a feeling - the feeling of the world slowing to a crawl, of the universe growing silent. Buffy understands it well, she's seen it so many times, she's felt it, too. Like the moment she watched Angel fall into Hell. Like watching him disappear into the fog, before heading to LA. Riley on the helicopter. Spike as the Hellmouth died around him. And now. Now, as Angel stumbles backwards, and his skin pulses with light. His eyes burn, and his hands shake. She remembers it too, that feeling, eyes in her blood. She remembers how she couldn't move.

Preacherman pulls away from her, and Satsu. Buffy screams, and she can't move fast enough to grab him, to stop him before-- He pulls away from the slayers trying to hold him down. And he is a mountain again, now, deep brown and black haired for a moment before he's fur, before he's black feathers, a raven. He grabs Angel's shoulders, and his voice, a high shriek, says, "You are a sinner," before he pushes forward, dragging Angel with him, and disappears into the shadows.

From miles away, the shatter-sound of breaking glass. Buffy squeezes her eyes shut against burning tears for no more than a fraction of a second. When she opens them, the mist has faded, and so has the music. Around them there is nothing -- simply the trashed remnants of a once beautiful penthouse apartment, its windows broken, its doors smashed down, a murdered man that was once a wolf lying in the center of a crimson-stained rug.

Buffy screams Angel's name and runs to the shattered windows, staring down at the empty streets below.

 

**Ten.**

 

(Preacherman says, "This is the beginning," and Angel wants to tell him that's a cliché. A nonsense line spouted by every cheesy villain in every lame movie Buffy's ever made him watch.

He'd say it, if he could talk.

"It's the beginning of evolution. The ancients understood this world far better than you children do. So blinded by science. So blinded by reason." Just inches from Angel's face, Preacherman says, "Oh, I know. You think you aren't a child. You think you're rather old, correct? Two hundred years on Earth, and countless centuries in timeless lands. But everything is relative." Preacherman's pale fingers wrap around Angel's shoulder. "You understand."

Angel's skin burns. And gazes, metaphorical or real, they can be like razor blades in his skin - the gaze of judgment, the gaze of his own self-evaluations. Preacherman whispers, "You are the sinner," and its like insects under his skin, crawling, cutting, burning.

He has been to Hell. He's inhaled the brimstone air that seared his useless lungs like wildfire. He's fought the demons, their clawed hands and endless coils, tentacles, their insect faces. He's felt the lash and the claw and watched the streets flicker with the red light of dimensions he would never have wished on the worst of enemies or the greatest of foes.

And it's difficult, perhaps impossible, to compare torments. Torment of the body, torment of the mind. The unhealing rake of claws in his skin, and the tear at his mind, the weight of his guilt.

It's been said that one tends to privilege whichever is most recent.

This, then, is the most recent of all.

Preacherman circles him, a vulture, eyes burning. Angel doesn't know where he is. It isn't Hell, he knows that - he knows the smell of Hell dimensions and the taste of their sulfur air. It isn't Hell, but it's dark, and his wrists ache with the press of metal cuffs against his skin.

Preacherman touches him, the inferno of his gaze, and says "Show me your sins."

Angel closes his eyes, tries not to let Connor's face come to mind, Cordelia's. Darla's. Drusilla. His father. His sister. A flood of images, sketches of Buffy made while she slept, and the knife twisted in her gut when he told her --

He opens his eyes in the inky darkness, and stares into the air, but his mind still screams.)

* * *

  
Buffy's room is empty without him, and cold. It doesn't make sense, because it isn't as though he brought in any heat (except the _heat_ , she thinks with a tiny smile) and yet somehow she needs two blankets for every one she used to use. She keeps the lights low and the shadows are hollow inside. 

* * *

At 1:06 in the morning, Willow arrives and whenever she opens doors these days, Buffy feels like there should be fairy dust, or tinkling bells. It's the whiff of magic that hangs around Willow - something tangible, tickling her nose and tingling her skin. Buffy's pretty straight, and even if she weren't it's _Willow_ , but even so there's something weird and intoxicating in that presence.

Willow sits on the edge of the bed, her dress draping long and swaying against her ankles. She says, "I thought you'd need someone to talk to. You know, get girlfriendy with. Girlfriendy in the non-gay, best friendy sense."

And Buffy wants to say she can be such a little girl lost. It's not happy-making, it's not fun or empowering or any of that good, slayer commander stuff. Maybe it's the Angel thing. Somehow, things are always circular, with them. She always manages to lose him in the end. Ten years later, and...

Willow says, "I get it. You finally got him back, and now he's gone." She looks down, those red locks in her eyes, framing her face. "And you keep thinking, maybe if you did something different you could have stopped it, or saved him. Or maybe if you didn't do something that made him leave to begin with he would have been over there instead of all where he was, and then there wouldn't have been all the mojo."

"It's the risk you take," Buffy says, knees against her chest. "Look what's happened to us, Will. Me, and Xander, and you..."

"Original Variety Scoobs. I know. We've all lost people, Buffy. But you're right, it's the risk." Willow's fingers are little and pale on the edge of her knee. "But you can still get Angel back. And no one you loved has really _died_ , died. I mean in a permanent way."

Buffy looks at her, and Willow widens her eyes, just slightly. "Oh! Spike. I mean, I didn't know if you--"

"No, that's okay, Will. I don't know if that was ever a love." She looks down. "He might have been." In another world, another time. Centuries ago, for him, years for her. For a while, there had been that sharp, timeless promise of eternal devotion, yes, his to her if not hers to him, and she would have been his new Drusilla, the center of his world, remaking him from the inside out in her image, a hero for her the way he was the big bad for Dru. But in the end, that hadn't held up, even for him. The last time she saw him, there wasn't much left of the them that was. If there was a them.

Willow says, "We'll find him. And we'll stop the bad things from happening, Buffy, it's what we _do._ "

Buffy wants to believe it.

But it's the day before graduation again, and there's blood on her hands and demons rising in her mind. The world is ending again, and he's disappeared another time. And Buffy, as always, balancing the hero and the woman, she's holding onto the memory of him, hoping it will still be there when she opens her eyes. Trying to keep in perspective - save the world. Save him, too.

Willow says, "If the prophecies are right, he'll try to open the gate to Hell soon. Or his sister will. Someone will! It's just like old times, right? With the library?" (Like old times in loss, in stakes, in grief...) "Giles thinks he has a lead on which Hellmouth it will be." Willow's smile is just a little thin, around the edges. She has lines around the edges of her eyes, now. "It'll be okay, Buffy. You'll see."

When Angel left, the first time, Giles told her that time heals everything. That he knew she felt like she could never breathe again, but that she would, one day.

It was true, in a way. But it was never the same.

* * *

Mythology is never literal. That's what Giles has taught her. It's never literal, and it never behaves. You call on Zeus, you get Jupiter, and no they're not the same thing, no matter what the storybooks and history classes say. They might be the same being, but they're not the same personality. Names have power, they say, especially in the world of magic. Use a new name, split the spirit. Something like that. She can never keep all of the rules straight. That's why she's not a witch.

The myth of Ragnarok goes as follows:

The portents begin with the birth and death of several gods, and extend to the endless winter. Wolves will devour the sun and moon, and floods and earthquakes will free Loki and Fenrir from their bindings, while the herdsman of the giants plays his harp in celebration of the end of days.

Then the battle will be begin.

But of course, Gods never behave. Or perhaps it's simply that legends are never, really, true. Even Hansel and Gretel weren't innocents, when she met them. Or, well, "them." Of course, the myth also says that, in the end, the world will be reborn, greener and sunlit, the survivors rebuilding. Buffy hopes that part, at least, stays intact.

It doesn't say "Loki will kidnap someone's boyfriend," though. That's notable, she thinks.

Giles is the one who suggests the obvious. "This... little variation claims that Hela will open the mouth to Hell, and the end shall come." Glasses off, eyes lowered, he says, "I gather this demon-goddess intends to open a Hellmouth."

And Buffy says, "Probably a really toothy one." There aren't many in the world. Giles says there are only a few more than a dozen. Buffy would have thought there'd be one in New York, but no - just California, New Jersey and Ohio, in the United States, anyway. At least, those are the ones they've found. "And they've got Angel there."

Glasses in hand, Giles says, "The Mayans believed that in order for the Earth to renew itself, there must be a sacrifice of sinners."

Buffy's gut twists and burns. "They're going to kill him."

"And probably any number of other ne'er do wells. Or perceived ne'er do wells, as the case may be."

"They're going to kill him and open the gate to Hell." Somehow that seems so repetitive.

Buffy rubs the exhaustion from her burning eyes. And maybe it's not surprising that, right now, all she wants is Angel at her side, stroking her hand in that unremarkable, casual way they'd taken to doing once they learned not to fight... destiny, or desire, whatever it is between them. That string that holds them together when they're apart, that pulls them together again when time and death and centuries and even their own hearts have pushed them away from each other.

She takes a deep breath and shakes her head. "It doesn't matter. We've got a world to save."

(And maybe it does matter. Maybe she really will always have that touch of seventeen in her heart when she thinks of him, looks at him. But she isn't a teenager now, and this is bigger than that, bigger than her feelings, his life. It's the world, and it's everything.)

Giles watches her, reaches across the table to rest his palm on the back of her hand. Buffy sits up straighter, a little.

(Besides. Nothing has managed to hold them apart yet. Maybe it's right to trust that.)

Buffy says, "Let's look at Hellmouths."

Giles slides his glasses back onto his face. "The Pine Barrens, in New Jersey. The Island of Surtsey. Vatican City--"

Buffy blinks. "Vatican City?"

Willow nods. "Duh. Why do you think they put the pope there?"

And Xander pauses, coffee mug in hand. "Holy... moly! I always knew there was something fishy about that hat."

Giles clears his throat. "Yes well, I'm sure we could discuss the ramifications of holy men living on Hellmouths for the rest of the night, but it doesn't bring us any closer to finding this... ah, this--"

"Preacherman?" Buffy says.

"Yes. This Preacherman. There is another in the Valley of Kings, in Egypt, and Ganghwa Island. Also, in Balleyboley Forest. And--"

Xander frowns at the map for a moment before he says, "Wait a minute. Did you say Surtsey?"

Giles looks at him. "Ah. Yes, I do believe I did. Rather a while ago, actually. Really, Xander, your power of observation are--"

"Very funny, library guy. You said Surtsey. That's your guy." Xander taps the island on the map. "It's called... Surtsey? Surtur's Island! I read about it. In a back issue of Thor." He says it with a grin, and a bit of pride.

Willow says, "Yay for high class literature," with a little nod.

Xander throws a yellow highlighter at her. "Surtur? The fire giant?"

Buffy bites her bottom lip. There's a certain grace to the suggestion - the critical role played by a tiny island named for the Giant once expected to ravage the world. A place built from the rage of the Earth, lava and ash, the fire of the Gods, or so it's been said. The Ancients must have thought volcanoes were the mouths of Hell anyway.

Buffy says, "We'll look into it."

Xander grins. He says, "The return of key guy."

* * *

The world is ending, they say, on December 20th, 2012.

It's a little scary, except... Buffy hears that kind of thing all the time.

 

**Eleven.**

Created by a three year long volcanic eruption, Surtsey has been dying since the day it was born. Once almost three kilometers, now it's just barely one, at least according to Giles. The island is fifty years old, and already going back home. It's sad, in a way - even islands have a limited lifespan. Like mountains, or oceans. One day the ocean will dry up, too. Pretty soon if they don't stop it from boiling. Not that's it's boiling now, but she wouldn't suggest anyone go swimming.

Buffy keeps the Scythe balanced between her two hands, her feet pushed against the helicopter floor. Outside the window, Willow is flying with the helicopter light dancing in her hair and the air on her face. Theirs isn't the only helicopter, of course - Buffy tries not to march into a war without an army, these days. Next to her, Satsu, shifts her blade from one hand to another, and Buffy knows she's trying not to look too long, trying not to yearn too much. Love's first kiss, it's one of those things that never really fades. Buffy knows that feeling well. First loves, they say, never really go away.

On the ground beneath them, the island smokes, and Buffy hears the churning of water, the harp strings, calling. She hears it in her head, or maybe in the air, in her ears. It's impossible to tell, anymore.

Speaking of her ears, Xander says "All right, what do you see?" into her earpiece, and Buffy jolts before she brings herself back to where she is.

"Um, steaming island," she says. "Hellmouth under it. Your typical doomsday scenario, but without the buildings and things." She leans forward, looking down. "Sorry you had to sit this one out."

"I'm not sitting it out, Buffy. Buff-buff. Buffster. I'm general-guy. General-guy does general stuff from very far away, lest he have his other eye poked out by another crazy preacher."

"Yeah, you do have baddish luck with those." She pushes her foot down, harder, against the floor. "Um, is there a read on Angel?"

Xander is quiet, and Buffy tries not to feel the seconds moving. "No. But we're getting heavy readings from the Hellmouth itself. If he's anywhere near it--"

"You couldn't really pick the hay strand out of the hay barrel. Yeah, I get it."

"He could still be down there." Tortured, tormented, strung up, bled dry, like with Drusilla, like with Spike, like with so many demons and vampires and things, things that wanted his blood or at least to use it against her. It's been a week since Preacherman took him - seven days, and hours, and minutes on top of that. She's not sure whether it would be kinder to find him dead than alive.

Well, "alive."

Buffy checks her watch.

It's 10:46pm. December 21st, 2012.

She adjusts her parachute, her earpiece.

Showtime.

They arrive as the hour turns to 11pm, and the air is thick with smoke and green light; ash and the smell of sulfur, like something rotting, like something _wrong_. Buffy drops from the sky; around her, slayers follow in twos and threes, filling the sky with their silhouettes and their parachutes blooming against the sky. Buffy feels the ground when she lands, the pulsing heat racing through the rocks and dirt, withering the plants and leaving scattered insect bodies strewn over the earth.

"There's definitely something unnatural here," she says, wrinkling her nose as she unstraps the parachute from her back. "What do you say we do a little lookaround?"

The Scythe rests against her belly, its length balanced between her hands, and she feels that pulsing, too - the power of the Slayer responding to the power of the Hellmouth gaping open under their feel, or around them, or... wherever it is. Buffy's seen three, now, and she hates how they never look the same way from city to city. It's like the Wizard of Oz, she thinks, you go in and you never know what to expect. They could be standing in it, now.

In her ear, Xander says, "Buff, we're getting heavy readings from the middle of the Island. Riiight where that fun dormant volcano is hanging out."

Buffy looks around, her gaze penetrating the trees. "Yay. Nothing I love more than lava dancing."

They split up, covering more area, but she keeps Satsu at her side as they move through the branches, stepping over the dead birds, dead tree branches. Underfoot, the ground is hot, like the streets of New York and the water in Venice. Buffy's rubber soled boots seem slippery, like the soles are melting. She tries not to think about that, and she doesn't check. Over her, Willow floats like a goddess of the air, her long skirts drifting in waves over her legs. It's comforting, in a way. Hell, Buffy figures, if it gets too bad Willow can always magic them out.

Of course, if it gets too bad, there probably won't be anywhere to magic them away to. And anyway, it's not like Buffy is ever going to run. Never surrender, never give up. Never put down your sword, or, well, in this case your Scythe. She hears Angel in her head, telling her that. Telling her she'll never fail; she never does.

(And if she wins, if this ends, they could disappear, go to Florida. And the sun would still be living there, and the air would be warm and the water blue like crystal, and he could sleep all day, and all night he'd have his fingers in her hair and his mouth on her mouth. She would watch the fish swim around her ankles, and lay down her weapons at last.)

Buffy hums under her breath as she moves through the trees, a little tune from childhood. Satsu watches her in the shadows. She says, "What are you humming?"

"Down by the riverside." Buffy whisper-sings, "I'm gonna lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside..."

(She'll never do it. Still, it's nice to think of it, sometimes.)

Glancing at Satsu, Buffy says, "At this point, you're kind of supposed to clap."

Satsu shakes her head. "I don't really feel like clapping."

In her hands, the Scythe pulses. "Yeah. Neither do I."

And the island is so dark, so hot, that Buffy feels like she's walking into Hell already. Still, she hums as she goes.

* * *

The slayers find each other again in a clearing surrounding a cave. It's not a clearing, really, Buffy has to admit, it's more like a minor break from the thick vegetation. Of course, while she's being picky, she's pretty sure the cave isn't a real cave. Carved into the side of a steep hill, it yawns like the jaw of a demon, and Willow says it's leaking magic. She says the walls are made of it, and in that sense it's probably more a construct than a geological feature. Buffy presses her lips together and wonders why evil beings can't just have a house these days. Maybe shack up in a nice warehouse. Things used to be so reliable.

Buffy shivers when she steps inside, swallowed by the sudden onslaught of cold, the prickle of ice on her skin. At her side, Satsu draws a sword with one hand, a dagger with the other. And inside is dark, a shadow inside a shadow; Buffy feels strange and swallowed, and like the walls are closing on her, though they're invisible in the black. Staying quiet, she listens to the footsteps beside her, Satsu's breath, and the pairs of feet following her as well.

The caverns are long and narrow, and Buffy feels they're going on forever. Even so, she doesn't want to turn on a flashlight, or even spark a match - it's unpredictable, what happens in a place like this. You never know when there might be fire demons, or darkness demons, or... actually, Buffy decides, it's definitely light time.

"Willow, can we light a spark in here?" Buffy takes six steps, and then stops. "Willow?"

And there's nothing surrounding her but silence.

Somewhere on her belt, there's a mini-flashlight; she scrambles for it, even as she hears the thickness of nothing - no footsteps, no breath. "Satsu?" She says as she pills the flashlight free. "Renee?" In her hear, her headphones crackle with static - no Xander, no Giles, no Willow, no friends.

She flips on the flashlight.

...the cavern, it's not like a tunnel at all. It's a wide mouth, a gaping wound of stalactites and stalagmites and dripping limestone, and red streaked walls, and Buffy can't see the whole in the moving pinprick glow of her tiny light, but she sees the parts, and how the stone looks like it's bleeding, and how there's nothing around here but air. She doesn't know where her companions have gone, or whether it's them or her that's left the other behind.

Reality warping demons and gods are always frustrating. She's been dealing with them a lot, these days.

The magic Willow leaves her blood is screaming, but there's nothing around... or at least nothing that she can see. Somewhere nearby, there is the drip-drip-drip of water from the cavern ceiling falling in trickles and splashing on her shoes, her face. Buffy turns the flashlight downward at her feet. There in her shadow, mixed with the dewdrops collected on the stone ground, is the red-streaks of blood mingling with the water. Buffy's heart clenches, her stomach tightens, because she's been here before, lived these same situations in life and in nightmares and she knows what she'll see when she turns the flashlight up. But she does anyway.

He is there, her Angel, suspended, chest open, eyes closed. Buffy fights down the urge to scream.

That's when she hears Mr. Preacherman, whispering in her ears.

"You mourn for the sinner?" This close, Preacherman smells like sulfur, like brimstone. He says, "But the sinner leads the way to heaven."

Buffy closes her eyes. "I've been to heaven. You don't get there like this."

When she opens them, Preacherman is in front of her, his blond-haired, middle-American face an inch away. His eyes are burning, ice blue. He says, "Not heaven for _you_."

Buffy ducks his first strike and armors her body in Willow's mojo; Preacherman's hands glaze off the magic, and it tingles, ripples, and yet it stays intact. Around her, in the blackness, there's the sound of steel and screaming, and she knows her friends are here, now. Separated and then together again, and of course somewhere in this room, this cavern, she knows there are demons too - Preacherman's slithering snake of a child with it venomous bite, and whatever other god-forsaken creatures have crawled from the Hellmouth. Wherever that is.

"You're just like every other lame demon I've ever killed," Buffy says, and the Scythe streaks beneath his feet as he jumps. "You talk a good game. Maybe bring darkness on the world for a few months. But in the end you have no followthrough. They just didn't have the endurance to go through a true Armageddon!" (She feels the give of flesh under the blade of her weapon, and Preacherman grunts in pain.) "Oh wait. It's not that they couldn't stick it out." (She swings again, and the impact of the blade with his body shakes her all over.) "It's that I killed them."

Buffy doesn't know why, but now she can see. She sees in floods of red light and gold, she sees in glows. It takes a moment to realize it's the light glowing inside the rock on the opposite end of the cavern. All around her, silhouetted in hell-light, there are her sister-slayers, scattered on the ground, or still standing with the blood of demons on her hands. The demons are there too, small and large, in the air and on the ground. Stretched across the cavern, a dead snake lies motionless, and in front of Buffy, Mr. Preacherman is still smiling.

"I'm no demon, girl." He steps back, off of the blade that's embedded in his chest. "I am--"

"I know, I know. You're destruction and death and all that yummy goodness." Buffy swings again. "Been there, done that, too."

Inside the light, Buffy can see the silhouette of a woman standing inside, like the star of a shadow puppet show. Preacherman's last kid, she knows. Opening the Hellmouth to let the darkness out. Buffy sets her mouth in a thin line. It's not going to happen.

She swings again.

_It's not._  
  
The next time Mr. Preacherman hits her, it sends shocks through her body and her armor splinters and falls - pieces of solid magic lying like shattered glass on the cavern floor. Buffy barely avoids his touch. Her heart beat drums a tune in her ears, and music seeps from the walls - the sound of the world's death cry played back on harp strings. She catches a glimpse of Willow's dress fluttering overhead, and something inside her unclenches. Willow's going to get Angel. He'll be all right. He'll be fine.

Then, Mr. Preacherman's hand grips her throat, and her body is aflame.

The first trickle of demons begin to emerge from the opening wall - small ones, at first, the foot soldiers of Hell. Preacherman's touch of gazes tears her, cuts her, but in the distance she hears Satsu take command, shouting orders even as her voice grows closer to Buffy.

And Buffy wants to shout, to tell her to get away, but she can't speak, can't breathe.

(Satsu. She knows she's hurt Satsu. She knows too well how it feels to wake up without the one you love; to dream of a future and wake up without one. She feels her mistakes crawling in her flesh. And she knows she's hurt Faith, although not always without cause. She knows the envy cuts both ways, sometimes, and maybe that it started with her first. Just a little. His fingers cut into her skin, and she knows she's hurt Xander. Years ago, but even so, it's true - he loved her, and she was oblivious, until it was too late, and then she was awkward and strange. And Preacherman breathes in her struggling, and Angel. She knows she hurt--)

Buffy's eyes widen, and something deep inside her clicks.

_"...if the Mayans were correct, the rebirth of the world will happen only in the pain of sinners, and the sacrifice of the righteous."_

She reaches up and slowly begins to pry his fingers from her skin.

_"You are righteous. But you are not innocent."_  
  
She understands.

"The sacrifice of the righteous. Satsu!" Buffy clutches the Scythe in between her hands, and only feet away, Satsu stares at her with her wide, accepting eyes. Buffy kicks Preacherman in the chest, sending him flying back two yards. It will be ineffective, she knows, but it buys her time. Enough time to look back, and she has to look back. She has to see...

Behind her, Angel has drawn his tattered coat close around his bleeding chest. Leaning on Willow, he's pale and drawn, but still there. He hasn't crumbled to dust just yet.

She smiles, and Angel's eyes darken. "Buffy," he says, "Don't."

"A sacrifice of the righteous," she says again, louder this time, and her voice carries through the cavern as the Scythe pulses in her hands. Around her, the slayers hesitate only for a moment before they begin to form ranks, maneuvering their enemies.

Buffy runs.

She runs at Mr. Preacherman, Scythe positioned against her chest, and beside her, she hears the stampede of a dozen girls, all strong, all brave. Born special but for once, not born alone.

Before them, the Hellmouth yawns. Behind them, there is everything they know, and they run driving the demons ahead of them, pressing against hot and scaly skin, the flash of blonde hair and green eyes just before they reach the wall.

And it's strange, passing from Earth into... somewhere else. She feels the air shift, and thicken. She feels the heat and cold mingling and dancing in patterns over her. She feels Preacherman's gaze touch too, searching her for long moments before everything goes black.

 

**Epilogue**

The cavern is empty when he arrives, and it echoes with his every step. On the ground, at his feet, his blood still stains the rock. It's warm here, though the heat lives in the air, instead of the ground now that the Hellmouth is gone. The caress of it warms his skin, but somehow the cavern still feels cold, to him.

It's just a state of mine, he thinks. A perspective. Who wouldn't find this place cold, after all he's lost here.

The shadows scatter in front of him as he walks, sunlight by his side, trickling over the rocks, over the walls. He stands in the dark places, away from its touch, until he sees her. She's sitting, perched, on a rock and she's golden, like she always was. Golden and smiling at him with her hair in her face, and the sunlight makes her skin glow.

Angel smiles back, and wonders if she's always been so small, so strong.

He sits on a rock opposite her, separated by the sunlight spilled across the grey stone floor. He says, "Buffy," with his hands in his lap and his coat pooled behind him, gathering near his feet.

And Buffy says, "Angel," with her warm eyes and little voice. "I didn't know if you'd come."

"Of course I came. I didn't really have a choice."

"You always have choices." Her hair is in two little braids lying by the side of her face, and her eyes are so big, so wide. Angel wants to say it's true, and that he believes in free will, but he doesn't, not always. He's never had much choice when it came to her. She says, "Is it gone?"

Angel nods. "It's gone. All of it. The magic, the demons. Even the slayers."

"It'll come back one day. It always does." She grins, shifting her foot against the ground. "Or maybe it won't. Maybe it's the end of an era for real. Wouldn't that be cool?"

Angel glances down. Her feet are wrapped in strappy white leather shoes - so fashionable, even now. "What are you going to do?"

She shrugs. "Hold the gate. Me, and the other slayers. Plus we've decided to make some changes down here. We spent the past few days messing with Wolfram and Hart; we tore up some of their contracts, burnt down one of their hangouts... it was full of bones and stuff. Pretty gross. But I thought we'd start there, just for you."

"That was sweet of you, Buffy."

"Yeah, I'm a regular Miss Sunshine with a Scythe." Watching him, she says, "What about vampires?"

"No more of those, either." He can't quite meet her eyes. "We'll find a way to bring you back, Buffy." They'll find a way. And he'll hold her hand in the golden light and kiss her, and they'll finally be...

"There's no magic, Angel. That means no gate opening. That means no me." She smiles again, sadly, face down. "It's okay, I've come to terms with it. Lots of fighting and guarding, but hey, that's what I did even before the big boom. Except here there aren't any coffee breaks. I miss the coffee breaks." She looks up. She doesn't say, _I miss you._

"Magic can't be gone completely." Angel reaches across the sunlight fence and runs his fingertips down the side of her body, over her smooth neck, the soft cloth of her clothes, and the cut of her jutting hipbones. He wonders when she got so thin. "After all, it's not normal to meet in dreams."

"Maybe," Buffy whispers, "Or maybe this is just a normal dream. Something you've cooked up in your spiky haired head because..."

"Because I miss you so much." Angel clenches his fingers, just for a moment. "Yeah. Maybe."

"Yeah. I mean, this isn't really gate-holding apparel. I'm not even wearing comfortable shoes." She looks down, and her hair tumbles into her eyes, over her face like a veil. "Either way, I think it's time to wake up."

Angel doesn't want to wake up. He doesn't want to leave. He wants to stay with her forever in the sunlit cavern and touch her skin and kiss her lips and feel her heart beating under his palm and listen to her breathe at night. He wants to stroke her hair and wrap her in blankets and laugh with her at stupid sitcoms, badly acted dramas. He wants to feed her chocolate chip ice cream and dream with her and watch her sleep.

But the world shifts around him, like it's changing into something else, and the cave is filled with light. Angel closes his eyes to shut out the sun. "Buffy. The dream I told you about. It wasn't a dream."

"Yeah, I see that now." Her voice is soft, trembly. "And just so you know? It sucked. But it was the right choice."

(He has so much to say, and there's not enough time.)

He opens his eyes just in time to see her smile, and the quickness of her breath when she pulls him close, kisses him, and he inhales deep, breathes her in. She's warm, and soft, and he feels her pulse under his fingertips, he feels every movement, every heartbeat.

And then she's gone, and his world ends as quickly as it came, that day when he saw her outside her school, young and full of hope, full of dreams, a thousand years ago.

 

 

 

 

(Angel opens his eyes in the cool light of morning, sheets twisted around his feet and arms, hands holding nothing. His own heartbeat thumping in his ears.)

 

I tiptoe softly to the timberline  
Where part of me is waiting  
On the other side.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in 2008. Jeez.


End file.
